CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubystripe-payments
Incerteza
Incerteza

Reputation: 34884

Creating a subscription in Stripe - I'm confused

I use stripe subscriptions for my users with one plan for, say, $10 per month for 100 API requests and that's a standard price. However, if the user has used 150 API requests, I charge them $10 + $3. For 200 and more requests it's $10 + $7.

Say, I've subscribed the user on October 9th. On November 9th the webhook event invoice.created will be called by stripe. So if the user has used 150 API requests, I have to add $3 more to the basic price (I can do that only within 1 hours according to Stripe documentation https://support.stripe.com/questions/metered-subscription-billing).

  if even.type == 'invoice.created'
    Stripe::InvoiceItem.create(
      customer: stripe_customer_id,
      invoice: event.data.object.invoice
      amount: 300,
      currency: 'usd',
      description: 'additional price'
     )

The questions:

  1. Will the event invoice.created, indeed, be called on November 9th for the first time?

  2. Will that additional price of $3 be added to the current invoice of $10 for October 9th-November 9th or will it be added to the future invoice for November 9th-December 9th? From the documentation it's not clear.

  3. How do I add metadata to the original invoice of $10? I can add metadata to the additional invoice but in case the user has used less 100 API request I don't have to create the additional invoice at all, so I can't rely to the additional invoice.

  4. It says

Create any invoice items before your customer is subscribed to the plan, and then create the subscription via an update customer subscription call.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1034

Answers (1)

koopajah
koopajah

Reputation: 25552

Each time an invoice is created, you get the event invoice.created on your webhook. So when you subscribe a customer to a monthly plan on the 9th of November, you will get this event on the 9th of November, on the 9th of December, on the 9th of January, etc.

The first invoice for a subscription (generated when you create a subscription) is always closed immediately, so it is not possible to add an invoice item at that point. If that's something you want to do (for a setup fee for example) you need to create the invoice item before creating the subscription. That way it would get added automatically to the first invoice created when subscribing your customer.

In your case, you want to add fees to the next invoice based on the number of API requests your customer made during the month that just ended. So in the invoice.created event you need to detect whether it's a new month starting or the first one. If it's a new month, you then need to decide whether you have to add an Invoice Item to the user or not (based on the number of API requests).

You can't add metadata to the previous invoice from the month before. You just need to add the invoice item to the current invoice (for the month that is starting) and put a description indicating that the extra line item is for the consumption for the previous month.

Upvotes: 1

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