cosmin-marginean_best-practices | Stripe Developers | Page 1

near roseBOT May 14, 2024, 8:41 AM

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chrome bladeBOT May 14, 2024, 8:41 AM

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worldly hill May 14, 2024, 8:49 AM

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Hi

I was wondering if this is the right way to model this use case in Stripe?
Yes this seems reasonable for me.
We modeled this as 1 Stripe customer with many Stripe subscriptions. This gives us A) but not B), because the Meter API only allow reporting against a customer ID, not subscription ID.
In the payload you can add custom fields, like subscription_id

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https://docs.stripe.com/api/billing/meter-event/object#billing_meter_event_object-payload

kind plume May 14, 2024, 8:50 AM

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Ah, that's good to know. But FYI, that's not specified in the documentation

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Thank you though, I'll give that a try!

worldly hill May 14, 2024, 8:52 AM

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Happy to help!

near roseBOT May 14, 2024, 9:03 AM

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lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:04 AM

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👋 taking over for my colleague. Let me know if there's any follow-up Qs I can answer!

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:15 AM

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So I've used these payloads as per your colleague's suggestion

  "payload": {
    "value": "10",
    "stripe_customer_id": "cus_Q6UNgOw0ZK5UvI",
    "subscription_id": "sub_1PGHOJKLBbXjYhNstXWrzWqR"
  }

  "payload": {
    "value": "5",
    "stripe_customer_id": "cus_Q6UNgOw0ZK5UvI",
    "subscription_id": "sub_1PGHOIKLBbXjYhNsu4JGBDrw"
  },

Same customer ID, different subscription IDs

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Each of the subscriptions now shows the same amount 15 (10+5) though.

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And in the "View upcoming invoice" there is no separation between the two

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So technically it captured 15, which is correct, but there is no separation between the two subscriptions in the invoice (or anywhere on the dashboard for that matter when it comes to billing)

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I tried with stripe_subscription_id btw, instead of subscription_id but it's the same effect

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:21 AM

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you can't specify both customer_id and subscription_id

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you need to specify either or

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:22 AM

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Ah, of course!

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:22 AM

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otherwise the customer will be used as default

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:23 AM

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Yep, that makes sense, of course

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That doesn't work without customer id though 🙂

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Unable to determine the customer this event is for. To fix, pass the customer ID in the event payload with key "stripe_customer_id".; request-id: req_5ieYYkL6qquV1X

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Tried both stripe_subscription_id and subscription_id

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:28 AM

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hmmm, sorry I mislead you on this one

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the metered billing is still new, even to us, so please bear with me

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:29 AM

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No worries, thank you for looking into this

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:31 AM

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just fyi, do both subscriptions have the same price?

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:31 AM

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Yes, that's correct

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It's one single type of subscription/product

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:32 AM

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that's why you're seeing the same usage on both subscriptions

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:32 AM

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Yes, our use case is that the customer can (must) purchase multiple of these

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:33 AM

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I'm not sure that would work with the Metered API though

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since the usage is recorded for a MeterID+CustomerID

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:34 AM

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Yep, it seems so

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:34 AM

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and the MeterID is linked to a PriceID

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:34 AM

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Yes, you're right

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:34 AM

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why not use the same subscription and increase the quantity of the price

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:36 AM

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It's not possible sadly, because the customer needs individual metering for each of their subscriptions. And invoice should reflect that. Imagine they manage two stores and we direct traffic to their stores from our platform - we want to tell them how much traffic we've directed for each of the stores as part of the invoice (aggregated of course, and in the form of cost/usage)

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So I'm guessing the only option is to create separate customers (which isn't ideal), which in turn means sending multiple invoices

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:38 AM

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you can actually create new prices/meter IDs

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so basically let's say you have a merchant A with Store X and Z

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you create a customer for A and then create a price under your product specifically for Store X and a meter for that and another one for Store Y

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this way you can have one subscription to generate one invoice with the 2 prices

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and the usage won't be aggregated between the two Stores

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:41 AM

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Ah yes, I thought of that, but I wasn't sure if it's practical. The only question there is: can we have tens of thousands of prices and meters in Stripe? (rough scale of the number of customers)

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:41 AM

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yes there is no limit to that

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:41 AM

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Golden! I'll give that a go and come back if any issues. Thank you so much!

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:42 AM

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one thing that can be beneficial though is to create a separate product for each customer

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just for visibility on the dashboard

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so you wouldn't have all of the prices under one product

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but then again you would need this extra step (create a new product each time)

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:44 AM

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Yes, I think that makes sense. It's far from ideal as it means those products can't be configured in a single place, but it's something that I think we can live with

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:45 AM

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what you can actually do is something like a product/price template on Stripe or in your code

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and replicate that each time

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:46 AM

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Yes, that's what I was gonna look into, that's the easy part to be honest 🙂
The hard part is when we'll decide to change the pricing structure and have to modify thousands of products. But then again, that can be automated

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:47 AM

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you can always use metadata to reference the original price ID for example

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and then use that metadata to list all the prices with that orginal price ID

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from there you can then list the subscriptions and update them

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:49 AM

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Yes, that's true. Plus that kind of change needs to me "managed" anyway so I don't imagine it can/should be a few clicks anyway. Thank you again, very helpful suggestions!

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:50 AM

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now that we're talking about it, I wish there was a simple way to duplicate a price 🤔

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I will suggest that internally and see where this might lead

kind plume May 14, 2024, 9:51 AM

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Yeah, that would brilliant!

lunar pilot May 14, 2024, 9:51 AM

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would you mind sharing your account ID so I can reference it?

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having a valid use-case for a real merchant can boost this

near roseBOT May 14, 2024, 10:00 AM

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kind plume May 14, 2024, 10:18 AM

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Yes, one sec

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