Advanced usage-based billingPrivate preview
Learn how you can use advanced usage-based billing to build your business on Stripe.
SaaS and AI businesses often want to charge customers based on the usage of their product while also charging license fees and burning down credits. Advanced usage-based billing lets you:
- Define and charge customers based on specific usage data characteristics (dimensions)
- Manage dozens to hundreds of rates on one meter
- Set up real-time credit burndown and automate credit issuance
- Add usage-based rates to rate cards and roll those changes out to all your users
Supported pricing models include:
- Pay as you go for many rates or meters
- Flat fee and overages
- Credit burndown with automatic top-ups
If the features and compatibility described on this page sound like they’re for you, sign up for the private preview.
Compare advanced and classic usage-based billing
Read the following sections to understand the basic differences between advanced and classic usage-based billing and which one works best for your business.
Classic and advanced usage based billing have different architectures.
With classic usage-based billing, you subscribe your customers directly to prices for each item you want to bill for (based on usage or a flat recurring fee). Each usage-based price is connected to a meter that records usage.
With advanced usage-based billing, you model the components of your plan (license fee, rate card, and service actions) and subscribe your customer to that plan.
Classic usage-based billing
Advanced usage-based billing
The following sections describe the key differences in feature support and compatibility between advanced usage-based billing that uses pricing plans and the classic usage-based billing that uses products and prices.
Billing functionality and feature support
The following table describes the use cases supported by pricing plans.
| Use case | CLASSIC | ADVANCED Private preview |
|---|---|---|
| Set up multiple items per subscription | 20 | Up to 500 |
| Roll out prices to all subscribers without code | ||
| Set up different pricing versions by user cohort | ||
| Set a billing interval distinct from a service interval | ||
| Automate changes to subscriptions over time | Coming soon | |
| Set up usage alerts | ||
| Configure an invoice finalization grace period | 1 hour (non-configurable) | |
| Discounts and promo codes | ||
| Promotional billing credits | ||
| Trials |
Stripe products support
The following table describes which products and features each integration path supports.
| Stripe product feature | CLASSIC | ADVANCED Private preview |
|---|---|---|
| Embedded pricing table | ||
| Automatic tax support | ||
| Manual tax support | ||
| Collect payment with Checkout | ||
| Customer portal | Limited 1 | |
| Invoicing | ||
| Automations | ||
| Smart retries |
1 Users can download invoices and view payment methods and customer information. Users can’t cancel a subscription or upgrade and downgrade subscriptions.