Charge usage based credits immediately or use external payments?

Partner Discussions
1

Hello,

Background: I have an app that will allow Shopify merchants to send SMS/Emails based on some automation. My current billing flow (implemented and approved) is that the user is able to choose a recurring plan that comes with some SMS credits and purchase one-time credits when running low.

New scope: My engineering team is looking to develop a new feature that will auto-recharge SMS credits when their credit balance reach a set threshold. This will allow merchants to not worry about always tracking their credit balance and not worry about the automated workflow that we allow our users to build out.

Pain point: I cannot find a way to set up this auto-recharge functionality using the Billing API (usage based) or Subscription API, since we want to charge them when they receive the credits and not the next billing cycle.

Question: Am I am overlooking something or the only way to do this would be to set up an external payment only for this auto-recharge functionality? The monthly recurring and one-time credit purchase can still go through Shopify as designed.

2

Hi @Yash_Bhambhani

The closest option in the Billing API are leveraging usage charges.

You can design your app to post usage charges when a merchant’s SMS credit balance exhausts for refilling their balance.

This means that the merchant will have two line items to their subscription with your app, one is the reoccurring subscription plan and the other is the usage plan.

That way, the merchant has a flat monthly fee that’s reoccurring, then you can layer on optional usage charges depending on their usage of SMS / Email credits for the billing period.

Hope this helps,