Usage pricing and checkout

Configure allowances and prices without confusing future usage with an upfront payment.

Configure the commercial model

Choose count, sum, distinct count, maximum, or last-value aggregation to match what you sell. Configure the price in the dashboard and attach it to the correct subscription. Meter-price administration is not a public SDK method simply because the internal route exists.

Pricing modelHow to explain it
Per unitBill eligible quantity multiplied by the unit price.
GraduatedPrice quantities within each tier separately.
VolumeSelect the applicable tier for the total quantity.
PackageBill packages according to the configured package size and rounding.
Fixed plus usageAdd the recurring base fee to the usage charge.

Example, excluding tax: a GBP 50.00 base fee includes 10 classes and extra classes cost GBP 5.00 each. Fourteen eligible classes produce 4 overage classes, GBP 20.00 usage, and GBP 70.00 before tax. Confirm the configured allowance/tier boundaries; do not charge the included ten twice.

Controls to review

Check unit-of-measure, currency, base charge, included allowance, tier boundaries, package rounding, carry-forward behavior, and threshold percentages. For percentage-based pricing, define the minor-unit input explicitly. A spending/notification threshold is not automatically a hard service limit.

Preserve the price and allowance associated with the billed period. Review the effect of subscription and schedule changes before applying them to existing customers. Inspect invoice provenance after the first renewal.

Checkout compatibility

Usage prices can be resolved for paths that permit deferred usage, but direct product-price Checkout Session creation explicitly rejects usage prices. Do not interpret a resolver accepting a zero-upfront usage component as every checkout path supporting it.

Use the subscription setup path supported by your merchant configuration, verify the resulting metered item, and test renewal in staging. A usage product must not be presented as free merely because no usage amount is collected upfront. Apple Pay is unavailable for usage/metered checkout; other payment methods remain subject to their own eligibility.

Related: Payment eligibility, Subscriptions, and usage inspection.

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