

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

If you sell a metered service, like Heroku or AWS do, are there automated ways of billing your customers&#x27; credit cards?<p>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&#x27;t change month-to-month.<p>What if the amount <i>does</i> change month-to-month? Are there processors or payment services that can accommodate that sort of business model?
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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.

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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/](http://aws.amazon.com/devpay/)

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wmf
A lot of payment processors will let you store a card number once and then
charge that card multiple times.

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rgacote
Yes, a wide variety of them: Stripe, Litle, Chase Paymentech, Cielo, ...

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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?

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gregcohn
Try something like Mashery?

