AI Billing
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Stripe Billing

Subscription and usage-based billing tightly integrated with Stripe payments, tax, and revenue recognition.

Invoice-basedBilling Portal
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Last verified: April 2026

Good fit if...

  • →Teams already on Stripe Payments that want subscription and invoiced usage billing without switching infrastructure
  • →Products with global payment needs requiring 50+ payment methods and 135+ currencies
  • →Enterprise SaaS requiring contracts, commits, CPQ, and ASC 606 revenue recognition
  • →Businesses that want a single vendor for payments, tax, billing, and revenue recognition
  • →Teams that expect to use the Metronome metering and contract management capabilities post-integration

Pricing

Model
Revenue percentage on recurring payments + Stripe Payments processing
Free tier
No
Starting price
0.5% of recurring payments (Starter plan)
Revenue %
0.5% (Starter) or 0.8% (Scale) of recurring payments
Per customer
None
Per event
None
Seat fees
None
Transparency
Full

Canonical scenario — 100 customers, $2K MRR, 100K events, 5 seats

Line itemCost
Platform fee$0
Per customer$0
Seat fees$0
Event fees$0
Revenue %$10 (0.5% × $2,000 on Starter plan)
Payment processingBlended
Total / month~$72 ($10 Starter billing fee + ~$62 Stripe Payments processing at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction on US cards; card mix dependent)

Starter plan at 0.5% is the lowest published tier; Scale plan would cost $16 (0.8% × $2,000) in billing fees before processing. Stripe Payments processing (2.9% + $0.30 per US card transaction) is an additional cost that varies by card mix; the ~$62 estimate assumes 100 transactions at average $20. Stripe Billing inherits Metronome's metering and contract tooling post-acquisition (completed January 14, 2026); integration timelines for combined features are not publicly dated.

Technical profile

DimensionValue
Billing model
Invoice
Usage authorization
Post-usage
Usage tracking
Real-time metering + periodic invoice
Wallet architecture
Add-on
Credit grants and balances exist as invoice adjustments, not a first-class wallet primitive. No real-time wallet debit.
Multi-asset support
USD only
Credits are stored in the customer's billing currency; no native custom asset types (tokens, GPU hours, etc.).
Payment processing
Built-in
PSP agnostic
No
Customer portal
Hosted portal
Stripe-hosted portal covers subscription management, payment methods, and invoice history; does not expose a real-time prepaid balance or self-service wallet top-up.
Auto top-up
None
Integration model
Replaces stack
Profitability analytics
Aggregate
Open source
No
License
Proprietary
Deployment
Cloud only
Enterprise contracts
Full support
Full enterprise contract support: commits, quotes, CPQ integrations, ASC 606 revenue recognition, CRM (Salesforce, NetSuite) integrations. Metronome's contract management is being integrated post-acquisition.
Pricing models
Subscription, Per-unit, Tiered, Volume, Seat-based, Hybrid (subscription + usage)

Strengths

  • +Comprehensive payments infrastructure — processing, fraud, tax, compliance, and revenue recognition on one account
  • +Global payment methods — 50+ payment methods and 135+ currencies with local acquiring
  • +Mature developer ecosystem with extensive SDKs, documentation, and third-party integrations
  • +Enterprise integrations including NetSuite, Salesforce, Stripe Data Pipeline, and ASC 606 revenue recognition
  • +Metronome acquisition (January 2026) adds high-throughput SQL-based metering and enterprise contract management
  • +AI-assisted Smart Retries use machine learning to recover ~9% more failed card charge revenue

Limitations

  • −Invoice-based architecture accumulates charges through billing cycles with no real-time wallet debit primitive
  • −Tight coupling to Stripe Payments — replacing or mixing PSPs requires rebuilding billing
  • −No native multi-asset wallet — no first-class tokens, GPU hours, or custom unit primitives
  • −Customer portal is invoice-centric and does not expose a real-time prepaid balance or wallet top-up
  • −Metronome integration is still in progress as of April 2026; combined feature GA dates are not public
  • −Full revenue reporting and advanced recovery require the Scale plan (0.8%), not the Starter plan (0.5%)

Not ideal for

  • ×AI products with real-time per-request costs where pre-authorization before incurring cost is required
  • ×Products using prepaid credit wallets with multiple asset types (tokens, GPU hours, custom units)
  • ×Teams that need or prefer a PSP other than Stripe for payment collection
  • ×Platforms that need a self-service wallet top-up UI embedded inside their own product
  • ×Teams needing event-level profitability analytics with vendor cost ingestion per customer or workload

Similar providers

Orb
Enterprise usage-based billing with SQL-defined metrics, pricing simulation, and deep finance integrations.
Invoice · Cloud only
Lago
Open-source billing platform for usage-based pricing, self-hostable under AGPLv3 with managed cloud tiers.
Invoice · Both
Metronome
Usage-based billing and enterprise contract management for high-volume AI and software companies; now part of Stripe.
Invoice · Cloud only
Flexprice
Open-source usage metering and wallet-credit billing with a no-code pricing dashboard for SaaS and AI teams.
Hybrid · Both

Company

Founded
2010
Headquarters
San Francisco, CA, USA
Funding
Private; last public valuation ~$70B (2023 tender)

Sources