Hello, I have been working on a billing system for my Shopify app and I wanted to clear out the behavior that Usage based subscriptions has.
The behavior I understand it has is that when a merchant uses my app I set the trigger and the charge, and the merchant can adjust the spending limit according to his needs.
But does this spending limit the merchant set gets reset every month, or does it just stays the set amount the merchant has set until he unsubscribes?
The usage charge limit is set to the billing period.
If you offer a monthly subscription, then the usage cap is refreshed every 30 days. Not in perpetuity. You’ll see a billingPeriodEndsAt date on the subscription details in the Admin GraphQL which denotes when the subscription restarts (ish, it’s not 100% accurate I’ve found).
So if you offer an annual subscription, the usage is recorded throughout the year then charged at the start of the next period. Obviously I don’t recommend this. It’s too long of a period.
Until Shopify can offer separate flat fee subscriptions from usage components in a single subscription, then usage based apps are forced to use monthly cycles.