How can I model volume-based subscriptions in stripe(.com)? Invoice are not sufficient, because there is a cap of 2000 items per invoice. We are a CDN and charge per GB. Ideally, there would be the option to increase a counter for an invoice item like (OnDemand Traffic - Amount 1500 - Price per Item: X cents). I looked very deeply into the docs but there is no example for this use case. Another way would be to model the GB traffic as quantity on a sub but this seems not very ... correct. Does stripe simply not have any option for volume-based pricing? Thanks!
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1 Answers
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Stripe supports metered billing by doing something like this:
Subscribe your customer to a $0/month plan (or whatever billing internal you want to use).
At the end of each billing period, a new invoice will be created and an
invoice.createdevent will be sent to your webhook endpoint.Create an invoice item (or more than one) with the amount that needs to be billed to the customer for the past billing period.
After approximately one hour, the invoice will be closed and payment will be attempted for the invoice's total amount, which includes the plan's base cost ($0) plus the amount of all the items you created for this invoice.
Basically, the idea is that you only create the invoice item(s) at the last moment, when you already know exactly how much the customer needs to be billed for.
You can read more about invoices here: https://stripe.com/docs/subscriptions/invoices.
