CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstripe-paymentswebhooks
David542
David542

Reputation: 110257

When to charge for monthly usage at end of billing cycle in stripe

I have a subscription plan which costs $10/month per user plan + data "overage" charges. In other words, it is similar to (not unlimited) cell phone data plan.

When should I add in the monthly data usage at the end of the cycle?

According to Subscription lifestyle documentation here, it says that the invoice.created event occurs roughly an hour before the invoice.payment_succeeded or charge.succeeded. However, it seems almost impossible to test this, as whenever an invoice is first created for a subscription, all the webhook events seem to fire simultaneously. How should this be dealt with? Note that I only want to update the metered usage amount one time, at the end of the cycle.

My code is currently something like this:

def stripe_webhook(request):

    if event_type == 'invoice.created':

        subscription_item_id = [item['subscription_item'] for item in stripe_data_obj['lines']['data'] if item['plan']['usage_type'] == 'metered'][0]

        data_usage = user.get_data_usage(start_date, end_date)
        usage = stripe.UsageRecord.create(
          quantity=data_usage,
          timestamp=int(time.time()),
          subscription_item=subscription_item_id,
          action = 'set'
        )

Upvotes: 1

Views: 914

Answers (1)

koopajah
koopajah

Reputation: 25572

If you want to manually add line items to the invoice, then you can definitely test this. The idea would be to put your customer on a trial period for a few minutes. The first invoice created is for the trial and you can ignore that one and all related events. A few minutes later, when the trial period ends, a new invoice will be created and an invoice.created event will be sent to your endpoint. That one will allow you to modify the new invoice and add the extra amount/fees to charge this month.

To do this, you would use the Create Subscription API and pass the trial_end parameter as a unix timestamp representing a few minutes in the future.

Separately though, if you really want to report over-usage, you could use metered billing and usage records as documented here: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/metered-billing

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions