#Сергей Панкратов - Pay Upfront

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

wind estuary
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Hello, good question. I don't know if we have a good built-in way to track usage like this. Metered billing and subscriptions are more for when a user will pay on regular intervals. My immediate thought is that this may be easier to do as one-off payments and to track the usage yourself but I am looking further in to this

stray vortex
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Thank you! I assume that since you are a moderator you must know all ins and outs of stripe, and if you are saying that its easier to implement this logic on our side then it must be true 🙂

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Here is what a person from the support tried to help me with. This won't work, right?

Me:
Yep, thank you, I read that
The problem is that we want to charge user upfront. And metered subscriptions are charged after the reported usage. Or am I missing something?
Support person:
Let me check if that's something we could do beforehand, one moment please Sergei.
You can create an invoice item on the customer first, and then create the usage based subscription. This will pull the invoice item into the first invoice, charging them up front and then you can report usage.
Me:
Thank you for a suggestion, I am afraid I don't fully understand how that would work
Can you elaborate please?
Support person:
Sure!

  • Create a customer
  • Create an invoice item for that customer
  • Create the subscription
  • This pulls the above invoice item ONLY onto the first invoice. Otherwise it'll have a value of 0
  • Then, create usage records that will charge at the end of each month for the usage reported
wind estuary
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Yeah, I think their suggestion is for something slightly different. That would allow you to charge $15 upfront but I don't think the way metered billing charges users lines up with what you are going for. I am a little fuzzy on metered billing so I will need to look in to this a bit more

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So basically, you want the user to pay upfront, they can use up their hours over any period of time, and as soon as they do you want to automatically charge them again to refill on hours?

stray vortex
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yep, thats exactly it

wind estuary
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Gotcha. I think that doing this via one-off payments and tracking usage yourself is the way to achieve this at the moment. Metered billing still expects to charge the user for their usage at regular intervals, it is more for charging a user for X minutes one month and then Y minutes the next, I don't think there is a good way to credit your user and trigger another full payment as soon as the credit is up

stray vortex
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Thank you very much!