Stripe Usage-Based Pricing (Node.js)

This OpenMeter example will show how you can report metered usage to Stripe; this is needed if you use Usage-Based Pricing (UBP), where customers pay after their reported consumption. As Stripe's usage report API has rate limits you can't use it directly for metering; This is where OpenMeter comes to the rescue to report aggregated usage to Stripe.

You can read more about Stripe's Usage-Based Pricing features here.

#Our Example

In this example, we integrate usage reporting with Stripe for an imaginary AI product that need to attribute Chat GPT token usage to their users. To report usage, Stripe recommends a periodic usage reporting. In this example we will report usage when npm start is executed. In a real app you want to report usage periodically via cron or workflow management.

#Prerequisites

Source code for this example is available here.

Clone the OpenMeter repository and navigate to the example directory:

git clone [email protected]:openmeterio/openmeter.git
cd examples/export-stripe-node

#1. Setting Up Stripe

In this example we will create a metered product called AI Tokens and price with a monthly recurring billing period, priced at $0.01 per unit (per token). Run the setup code in this repo with your Stripe key:

STRIPE_KEY=sk_test_... npm run setup

This will create product, price, customer and subscription entities in your Stripe test account and print out the links to the them:

Stripe product created: https://dashboard.stripe.com/test/products/prod_xxx
Stripe price created: https://dashboard.stripe.com/test/prices/price_xxx
Stripe customer created: https://dashboard.stripe.com/test/customers/cus_xxx
Stripe subscription created: https://dashboard.stripe.com/test/subscriptions/sub_xxx

#2. Report Usage

Ensure your OpenMeter runs. Check out the quickstart guide to see how to run OpenMeter. Run the following to report usage to Stripe:

STRIPE_KEY=sk_test_... npm start

You should see the usage reported to Stripe as:

stripe_customer: cus_.., stripe_price: price_.., meter: m1, total_usage: 10.000000, from: 2023-06-07 14:00:00 -0700 PDT, to: 2023-07-07 14:00:00 -0700 PDT

If you visit the subscription on the Stripe dashboard, you should see usage reported on it.

#3. Check out the sample code

Check out the sample code's app.ts file in this repo to see how to report usage to Stripe.

Note OpenMeter collects usage in windows. The default window duration is hourly. In this example we round start and end dates to the closest OpenMeter windows. For example if a subscription's billing period ends at 1:45 PM, we will only reported at 1 PM so usage occuring after 1PM will slip into the next billing cycle. It depends on your use-case what window size makes sense for your application. In OpenMeter you can configure window sizes per meter.

Note In the sample code, we call Stripe's report API with action=set We do this to ensure idempotency so that no double reporting can happen.