4 ms·
Ask HN: Is there a way to bill automatically for a metered service?
If you sell a metered service, like Heroku or AWS do, are there automated ways of billing your customers' credit cards?
Normally, using any one of a number of recurring-billing options would do the trick. But it seems like these are largely intended for cases where the amount that gets spent doesn't change month-to-month.
What if the amount does change month-to-month? Are there processors or payment services that can accommodate that sort of business model?
- rgacote 13y agoYes, a wide variety of them: Stripe, Litle, Chase Paymentech, Cielo, ...
- jxf 13y agoIt seems like many of these services want you to use metered billing as part of a subscription, though. That's not really my use case. I guess I could hack it by making a $0 subscription and charging the metered portion there?
- wmf 13y agoA lot of payment processors will let you store a card number once and then charge that card multiple times.
- gregcohn 13y agoTry something like Mashery?
- esw 13y agoBraintree and Stripe both allow you to store card numbers without creating a subscription. I would either go the prepayment route (allow the customer to re-load a balance, then draw it down with usage), or set billing/time thresholds (bill the balance every X days or whenever the total hits $Y). I use several API services that use the reloading method, and Google Adwords does the billing/time threshold.
- mkempe 13y agoYes, AWS can be metered and charged automatically with Amazon DevPay. One potential issue with DevPay is that a customer cannot open multiple accounts on your service with one same Amazon account. http://aws.amazon.com/devpay/ http://aws.amazon.com/devpay/