CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpstripe-paymentsbilling
Josh
Josh

Reputation: 3288

Can I charge a variable amount to Stripe as a subscription?

I want to use the Stripe API to bill users every month for an amount they specify. It appears that Stripe does not allow websites to create a subscription without first setting up a plan for it manually, restricting what people can bill themselves for to predesignated amounts.

What is the best way to do this?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 7381

Answers (1)

Leo Khoa
Leo Khoa

Reputation: 957

You can! Before we talk more about how this works in practice, make sure you understand when an invoice is open for modification.

Subscribing your customer to a new plan, or updating your customer's existing subscription

If you are subscribing your customer to a plan via the API, you won't be able to add any custom fees after the initial invoice is created since it will be immediately closed. This means you'll need to setup any custom amounts before the initial invoice is created. You can do this in one of two ways:

Set the account_balance when creating a customer or updating a customer's subscription.

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

In either case, we'll pull the account balance or any outstanding invoice items into the initial invoice, so your customer will still be charged for the setup fees. These are essentially one-time charges that you are combining with the subscription's recurring charges. Since these are being added to the invoice total, only a single charge is being created.

Subscription renewals

The account balance and invoice items are simply one-time adjustments to your customer's account, so they won't be automatically applied each month. If your service uses metered billing or needs to add custom amounts for taxes or other dynamic costs, then you will need to create invoice items every month.

To get started, just use webhooks to listen for the invoice.created event. Whenever an invoice is open for modification, your webhook endpoint can create an invoice item that references the existing invoice's ID. We'll automatically pull this amount into the invoice total before charging your customer, approximately an hour after the invoice's creation.

Link: https://support.stripe.com/questions/metered-subscription-billing

Upvotes: 9

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