Set up billing creditsPublic preview

Learn how to implement a prepaid billing solution with billing credits.

Use Meters and billing credits to offer credits to your customers when they prepay for usage-based products or services, or as a promotional offering.

Before you begin

Before you can use billing credits, you must set up usage-based billing:

Create a billing meter.
Create a pricing model and add the meter to it.
Create a subscription that includes your customer, product, and usage-based price.

Grant billing credits to your customer

Use the Stripe Dashboard or API to create a credit grant for your customer.

Billing credits only apply to subscription line items that link to a meter price. The (Usage Records API) isn’t supported.

On the Customers page, select the customer name.
On the customer page, under Credit grants, click the plus (+) symbol.
On the New credit grant page, do the following:

For Name, enter a name for your credit grant.
For Amount, specify the amount of the credit grant.
(Optional) Under Effective date, specify a date for when to grant the credit.
(Optional) Under Expiry date, specify the date, if any, when the credits expire.
(Optional) Under Priority, specify the priority for this credit grant.
(Optional) Under Eligibility, specify a list of usage-based prices that this credit grant applies to.
Click Create grant.

Apply billing credits to invoices

After the invoice finalizes, Stripe automatically applies all applicable billing credits. The available balance on the credit grant updates based on the amount of billing credits applied to the invoice.

You can find the amount of billing credits applied to an invoice in the Stripe Dashboard.

On the Customers page, select the customer name.
On the customer page, under Invoices, select an invoice.
On the invoice page, under Subtotal, find the line for Credit grant applied.

Retrieve the available billing credit balance

Use the Stripe Dashboard or API to see the available billing credit balance for a customer. When using the API, retrieve the Credit Balance Summary endpoint.

On the Customers page, select the customer name.
On the customer page, under Credit grants, find the list of credit grants that can apply to invoices. You can see the credit grant’s available_balance in the Available column.

List transactions for a credit grant

Use the Stripe Dashboard or API to see the transactions for a specific credit grant or customer. When using the API, call the Credit Balance Transaction endpoint.

On the Customers page, select the customer name.
On the customer page, under Credit grants, select a credit grant.
View details for the credit balance transactions.