About the Billing APIs
Understand how the Billing API objects work together.
Subscriptions automatically create Invoices and Payment Intents for you. They have the following parts:
- A Product to model what is being sold.
- A Price to determine the interval and amount to charge.
- A Customer to store the Payment Methods used to make each recurring payment.
API object definitions
Resource | Definition |
---|---|
Customer | Represents a customer who purchases a subscription. Use the Customer object associated with a subscription to make and track recurring charges and to manage the products that they subscribe to. |
Entitlement | Represents a customer’s access to a feature included in a service product that they subscribe to. When you create a subscription for a customer’s recurring purchase of a product, an active entitlement is automatically created for each feature associated with that product. When a customer accesses your services, use their active entitlements to enable the features included in their subscription. |
Feature | Represents a function or ability that your customers can access when they subscribe to a service product. You can include features in a product by creating ProductFeatures. |
Invoice | A statement of amounts a customer owes that tracks payment statuses from draft through paid or otherwise finalized. Subscriptions automatically generate invoices. |
PaymentIntent | A way to build dynamic payment flows. A PaymentIntent tracks the lifecycle of a customer checkout flow and triggers additional authentication steps when required by regulatory mandates, custom Radar fraud rules, or redirect-based payment methods. Invoices automatically create PaymentIntents. |
PaymentMethod | A customer’s payment instruments that they use to pay for your products. For example, you can store a credit card on a Customer object and use it to make recurring payments for that customer. Typically used with the Payment Intents or Setup Intents APIs. |
Price | Defines the unit price, currency, and billing cycle for a product. |
Product | A good or service that your business sells. A service product can include one or more features. |
ProductFeature | Represents a single feature’s inclusion in a single product. Each product is associated with a ProductFeature for each feature that it includes, and each feature is associated with a ProductFeature for each product that includes it. |
Subscription | Represents a customer’s scheduled recurring purchase of a product. Use a subscription to collect payments and provide repeated delivery of or continuous access to a product. |
Here’s an example of how products, features, and entitlements work together. Imagine that you want to set up a subscription service that offers two tiers: a standard product with basic functionality, and an advanced product that adds extended functionality.
- You create two features:
basic_
andfeatures extended_
.features - You create two products:
standard_
andproduct advanced_
.product - For the standard product, you create one ProductFeature that associates
basic_
withfeatures standard_
.product - For the advanced product, you create two ProductFeatures: one that associates
basic_
withfeatures advanced_
and one that associatesproduct extended_
withfeatures advanced_
.product
A customer, first_
, subscribes to the standard product. When you create the subscription, Stripe automatically creates an Entitlement that associates first_
with basic_
.
Another customer, second_
, subscribes to the advanced product. When you create the Subscription, Stripe automatically creates two Entitlements: one that associates second_
with basic_
, and one that associates second_
with extended_
.
You can determine which features to provision for a customer by retrieving their active entitlements or listening to the Active Entitlement Summary webhook. You don’t have to retrieve their subscriptions, products, and features.