CODEWITHSUNDEEP
stripe-payments
Zakaria
Zakaria

Reputation: 4806

Report usage right before billing period ends in Stripe

How can I report how much a customer has used of the service right before the billing period ends in Stripe?

What I found in the docs is that usage can be reported periodically, but in my use case I just want to charge the user in function of how much they used the service. For example if the user has used 900 (arbitrary unit) during the billing period (monthly in my case), then I want to charge them for example 3% of 900 in usd. I can't report usage as it happens because it happens way too often and the sql query to get it is somewhat expensive. But I could at the end of the month get the total usage during that month.

I was thinking I could do this by creating a monthly recurring price for the product with metered usage, and then use a webhook event at the end of the month to report usage. But I'm not sure what webhook event I should be listening to.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1687

Answers (2)

Zakaria
Zakaria

Reputation: 4806

I achieved this by completely ditching the metered price and creating a normal monthly price for the product with $0/month. I then listen to the invoice.created webhook, and I check if the invoice is for this new price, and if so I'd add invoiceItems to the invoice with an inline price describing how much the user should pay (which is of course calculated in function of the customer's recorded usage) :

$stripe->invoiceItems->create(
    [
        'customer' => $customer,
        'invoice' => $invoiceId,
        'price_data' => [
            'currency' => 'usd',
            'product' => $product,
            'unit_amount_decimal' => $howMuchToPay * 100 //because in cents
        ]
    ]
);

This is possible because when the invoice is created, it can still be edited until it's finalized.

Upvotes: 4

Jonathan Steele
Jonathan Steele

Reputation: 1938

If you want to collate usage into a single report request, you have up until 5 minutes after the end of the billing period to report usage for that period. Based on that, my recommendation would be to:

  1. Listen for customer.subscription.updated events which will fire to reflect the start of a new billing period.
  2. From receipt of that event, you'll have ~5 minutes to report usage for the previous billing period.
  3. Collate your usage data from your application using the current_period_start timestamp from the webhook event, and make the required API request to Stripe reporting the usage.

Upvotes: 1

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