Overview
OpenMeter Billing is currently in Beta.
OpenMeter subscriptions are designed to work well both with pre-defined plans for self-service motion and also allow to customize the pricing and entitlements for specific customers to enable seals deals. This flexibility makes OpenMeter a great fit for both PLG (Product-Led Growth) and PLS (Product-Led Sales) companies.
How Subscriptions Work
An OpenMeter subscription defines a customer's access and pricing, linking them to a pricing model based on either a pre-defined plan or a custom configuration. Subscriptions are the foundation of your billing relationship in OpenMeter.
Subscriptions act as the bridge between your Customers, their chosen Plans (or custom pricing), and the Meters tracking their resource consumption. This provides a low-effort, automated way to translate raw usage data into billable amounts. While you can manually configure billing and pricing for each customer, subscriptions offer a streamlined and scalable solution. With subscriptions, you can easily manage customer access, tailor pricing models to specific customer needs, and gain insights into usage patterns to optimize your pricing strategy.
Subscriptions can be based on pre-defined plans, offering consistent pricing and entitlements, or configured with tailored settings for specific customers requiring unique access and rates. This configuration is defined at subscription creation time.
Subscription Entities
OpenMeter subscriptions have the same structure as plans, but some templating fields are changed to concrete values.
| Concept in Plans | Equivalent in Subscriptions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
PlanPhase | SubscriptionPhase | |
RateCard | SubscriptionItem | |
EntitlementTemplate | Entitlement | Entitlements are created with defined activeFrom keeping the UsagePeriod defined in the template |
PriceTemplate | Price | Price instances are created with concrete timestamps while keeping the defined BillingCadence |
Subscription Alignment
OpenMeter allows for all SubsctiptionItems to be billed separately, enabling a
wide range of advanced pricing scenarios. Though this behavior is desirable for
advanced use cases, it can lead to complex billing structures. To simplify
billing, OpenMeter can align all SubscriptionItems to the same billing cycle.
This ensures that all items are billed at the same time, making it easier to
manage and understand your billing. By default, all Subscriptions are created
aligned. You can opt out of this behavior to bill separately.