Looking for clarity on the cappedAmount billing cycle.
We have a combined time and usage-based billing for our app, currently only available subscription is monthly. Looking to offer annually time based subscription with monthly usage changes. Currently we have a cappedAmount, and need to understand if the cappedAmount applies to the monhtly usage-based billing or if that value would apply the entire year when combined plan was selected for annual time-based subscription with monthly usage-based billing.
In this document, Create usage-based subscriptions , it references that the cappedAmount is the maximum during the 30-day billing cycle, which I’m interpreting to mean the store’s Shopify billing cycle or the monthly usage-based cycle. However in this document, AppUsagePricingInput - GraphQL Admin, it refers to the subscription billing interval, which I would interpret in this situation to be annual.
Looking for clarity of what billing period the cappedAmount would be relevant to for a combined annual time-based app subscriptions that also has monthly usage-based fees. Is the cappedAmount annual or monthly?
Thanks!
Hey again @Dana_Boehm 
To clarify, the recurring pricing that you set will be billed annually in this case.
For the usage charges, those are applied immediately to the merchants invoice when you create the usage record.
The capped amount applies to the merchants 30 day billing cycle. Our merchant facing help docs do a little better job of explaining this with visuals:
For apps that have charges based on usage, the fees are added to the next bill. For example, if there’s an app usage event on April 26, then it’ll be included in the May 5 bill. Furthermore, the usage record from May 15 displays on the June 3 invoice. Although both usage events are from the same app subscription, they’re billed on separate invoices due to the dates the usage occurred.
I actually should redact some of that. Combined plans are only available on 30 day interval plans, so you can’t combine annual with usage charges. The rest of above is still helpful though 
Is the Shopify team open to allowing the combined plans as described, with an annual time-based subscription and overages as billed at the time they are billed, which in our situation would be a monthly cycle?
It’s not currently possible, but I will note this down as a feature request.
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Hi there,
We ran into the same wall when we wanted to offer annual plans with monthly usage on top. The 30-day only restriction for combined plans is pretty limiting, especially for SaaS-style apps where annual upfront with monthly overage billing is kind of the standard model.
Good that @KyleG-Shopify noted it as a feature request, hopefully it gets some traction. For now we ended up handling the “annual + usage” logic on our side, outside of Shopify’s billing API, which adds overhead but at least gives the flexibility.
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For other ways to keep it within the billing API, I have seen other developers create $0 monthly subscription with a capped amount set higher than the annual charge. Then create the annual charge as a usage charge.
The catch with this is to ensure you have really clear messaging with merchants so they understand the annual charges when they come through.
Thank you for the suggestion, appreciate the additional thought! The downside here would be that any proration logic for plan changes would then need to be managed on our side. We would prefer to use the default upgrade/downgrade logic Shopify already considers for plan changes.
Absolutely. I did share that in the request as well.