Stripe - A Single Monthly & Metered Product

Question

Building a SaaS service with a $30 monthly fee. There are additional 1-time-use services they can use during the month. To make the payment quick and nearly thoughtless, I want to also run a metered bill.

How would I setup a product in the dashboard for this? How would my invoice.succeeded / invoice.failed webhooks to discern if they've only paid the metered bill, only next month's bill, or both paid.

Example: Pays $30 for 1 month. Uses additional services (total $5)
Next Month Payment Cases:
If the user pays next month: $30 / month + $5 previous month (single payment totaling $35).
If the user doesn't pay next month: $5 for usage of previous month and subscription status marked as ' canceled '.

I spoke to the Support Chat (they're smart!). They've recommended doing a metered bill with a flat fee of $30. This is great except the monthly fee is paid at the end of the month. When they enroll, no deposit is made until an entire month of service.

Answer 1

The approach here is to have 2 Products/Prices (with the same billing period ie monthly) and to create the Subscription with both of these Prices. The first is the fixed price recurring monthly amount of $30. This will be billed up front on every billing cycle.

The second Product/Price should be a metered Price based on volume [1]. You then would report usage to the API during the billing period [2] (specifying the metered subscription item). That will be the one-time occasional use per month. In this model the upcoming Invoice will be for $35, 30 from the standard monthly subscription, and $5 that was reported as used during the previous month.

If a customer doesn't pay the Invoice, it follows the normal Invoice lifecycle [3]. There is no separate billing/payment for Subscription items.

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/model#common-models

[2] https://stripe.com/docs/api/usage_records/create

[3] https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/overview#invoice-lifecycle