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I think it's easier for billing systems to have 1 subscription for 1 customer. The reason behind this is mainly because you can apply several prices to the same
by Rafsark 4y ago
I think it's easier for billing systems to have 1 subscription for 1 customer. The reason behind this is mainly because you can apply several prices to the same feature belonging to two different subscriptions. Stripe does not work on it because they might consider this as a edge case.
When you look at usage-based billing, even if a billed feature is linked to consumption, it needs to be related to a subscription given the fact that this feature can be priced differently for several plans. Every company has a singular pricing model in mind and it's hard to have an all-in-one model fitting all the needs.
Even when we built internally the whole system for a fintech back in 2016, we had some edgecases creating conflict inside the company.
- christophilus 4y agoThis is what I’m doing, but then you don’t get a clean history in Stripe, which is annoying to folks (e.g. to our support team). So, it’s something I’m thinking about changing.
- gen220 4y agoIt definitely is an edge case. But I'd push back on the 1 subscription per customer idea. Consider any physical fulfillment business, where you have an optional annual membership (amazon prime, costco, whatever) and N subscriptions of varying frequencies for physical products. It doesn't make sense to roll these into a single subscription on the backend (unless the periodicity happens to line up perfectly, and even then there's a heated debate, since you still probably want them to be separate charges). You can go down the route of creating N "virtual" customers for each "real" customer, but it doesn't really solve the problems, because these N customers have a complex relationship with each other that you need to encode and manage. Hence, the name of this post :). It's definitely not easy!