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Ask HN: A payment processor that pre-charges metered use

1 points by metaloha ↗ HN
My example would be a music school: students pay by credit card or cash on the 1st of each month for the number of lessons they are scheduled to receive that month. For example, in October, someone who has lessons on Wednesday will have 4 lessons and be billed $40 on October 1st, but that same student will be billed for 5 lessons on November 1st because there are 5 Wednesdays that month.

Stripe and PayPal don't seem to have this ability (either pay afterwards, or it must be the same amount each month).

Is there a processor (ideally as easy to work with as Stripe) that supports this type of billing?

Thanks HN!

4 comments

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stuartjohnson12
Why would you want this?
metaloha
This is how music and dance schools charge clients (at least here) - pre-pay based on the number of lessons you will attend this month. What I'm looking for is a way to automate it so we don't need to manually charge everyone's cards individually (and manually) each month.
stuartjohnson12
But WHY? I don't understand what benefit metering your payment provider has.
metaloha
shrug I don't know how to explain it any better. We want to charge a credit card _before_ the lessons for the month, and the amount will be different each month (either 4 or 5 lessons). Stripe will let us do this _after_ the month (so-called "metered" billing), but not before; they will also do subscriptions but they need to be the same amount for each invoice. So I'm looking for a payment solution that will automatically bill a credit card for a variable amount each month without the client needing to manually enter or approve their payment information each month. It's a subscription where the amount is different each month, and needs to be paid _before_ the service is provided.