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Ask HN: Is there a way to bill automatically for a metered service?

2 points by jxf ↗ HN
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?

6 comments

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rgacote
Yes, a wide variety of them: Stripe, Litle, Chase Paymentech, Cielo, ...
jxf
It 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
A lot of payment processors will let you store a card number once and then charge that card multiple times.
gregcohn
Try something like Mashery?
esw
Braintree 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
Yes, 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/