How rate cards workPrivate preview

Learn how you can use rate cards to model your business on Stripe.

You can use rate cards to offer complex pay-as-you-go pricing models. You subscribe customers to one rate card that contains many different rates. You can add new rates to rate cards so that existing customers can use new features and get billed for their usage immediately. You can also create different versions of rate cards. Learn how to set up usage-based billing with rate cards.

Private preview

Rate cards are currently in private preview and could change in shape and integration path before they’re generally available to all Stripe users. Sign up here to join the private preview.

Rate card concepts

Here are the key concepts for understanding how rate cards work, along with an example of what a complete rate card looks like:

A rate card with a rate that contains a metered item.



Meter	Meters specify how to aggregate meter events over a service period. Meter events represent all actions that customers take in your system (for example, API requests). Meters attach to metered items and form the basis of what’s billed. For example, a business offering AI services might have meter events that represent the number of tokens a customer uses in a query. The meter tracks the sum of tokens over a month. The aggregated usage forms the basis for the invoices generated for each billing cadence. You can use the Stripe Dashboard or API to configure a meter.
Metered item	The granular item that the customer is paying for. For example, an LLM model or tier of token usage. You can apply metered items to multiple rate card rates. Each metered item must be associated with a meter.
Rate card	A collection of rates, representing a comprehensive pricing plan for a product. You can subscribe customers to a rate card by creating a rate card subscription that’s associated with a billing cadence. You can subscribe multiple customers to a rate card. You can also subscribe customers to specific rate card versions.
Rate card rate	The pricing configuration for a metered item in a rate card. The rate defines the price type (fixed rate, volume, graduated, or overage), price amount, and quantity configuration (you can sell individual units or packages of units). Each rate card can contain multiple rates (up to 1,000).
Rate card subscription	The customer subscription associated with a rate card. You can associate multiple subscriptions with one billing cadence. This means that you can subscribe a customer to multiple rate cards with different service periods but the customer will only be charged according to one cadence. Learn more about rate card subscriptions work.
Rate card version	The version of a rate card. Rate card versioning in Stripe allows for flexible pricing management. When you create a rate card, an initial live version is automatically set as the default for new subscribers. Modifying or deleting existing rates creates a new version. Adding new rates doesn’t create a new version. The original version remains live until it’s manually changed, which lets you offer different pricing for existing and new customers. When subscribing a customer to a rate card, you can either specify a particular version or let Stripe assign the current live version. After the version is assigned, customers stay on that version unless you manually change it.