Concepts

Accounts

Accounts hold information about your customers.

Products & pricing

Products describe the items you are selling to your customers. Products can have one or more prices detailing how much they cost and how often they are billed.

Prices

Prices describe how much a customer pays for a product and how often they are billed. A product can have one or more prices. A price can be usage-based or fixed and the pricing model can be one of:

• Flat - A fixed amount charged at regular intervals (e.g., $20/month).
• Per-unit - Charges based on the number of units consumed (e.g., $5 per user).
• Package - Bundled pricing for a set of features or services (e.g., $50 for 100 API calls).
• Volume - Tiered pricing based on usage volume (e.g., $10 for 1-100 units, $8 for 101-200 units, $6 for 201-300 units).
• Graduated - Graduated pricing based on usage volume (e.g., $10 for the first 100 units, $8 for the next 100 units).
• Percentage - Charges based on a percentage of the total amount (e.g., 10% of the total amount).

Plans

Plans bundle products together for subscriptions. While products can be added directly to a subscription, we recommend using plans to bundle products together. For example, a "Pro" plan might include an SMS product and a voice product.

Invoices

Invoices calculate and capture the revenue from customer purchases. Invoices can be created manually or automatically based on subscriptions.

Charges

Charges are generated when usage events are processed or a subscription is billed but not yet invoiced. Charges can be settled from credits or invoiced.

Credit grants

Credit grants are spendable balance buckets on a customer account.

Credit assets

Credit assets are non-currency instruments identified by asset metadata your product defines.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions describe a recurring billing relationship with a customer.

Customer portal

The customer portal is a self-serve portal that allows customers to manage their subscriptions, invoices, and payments. It is hosted on Billingrails and can be customized with your own branding.

Entitlements

Entitlements define what a customer can access and how much they can use based on their subscription-through feature gates (on/off), feature privileges (levels within a feature), allowances, and quotas (caps that may trigger overage charges or restrictions).

Benefits

Benefits model feature flags, privileges, allowances, and quotas in your system. Benefits can be assigned to product prices and when those products are purchased Billingrails will create entitlements to the benefits for the customer.

Usage billing

Usage billing allows you to charge customers based on their actual usage of your product or service. This model is ideal for businesses that offer services where consumption can vary significantly between customers. This flexible model is ideal for SaaS companies, cloud services, and any business where usage can be easily measured.

Meters

Meters define how usage events are aggregated and filtered (for example counting calls or summing message volume). You attach meters to product prices to drive billing, or to feature benefits to measure entitlement usage. Each meter can define multiple profiles with their own aggregation and filters.

Events

Events are individual actions you record for usage tracking, such as an API call or a file upload. Each event can carry properties for filtering and aggregation. Your application sends events to Billingrails; meters roll them up into billable quantities over a period or per billing rule.

Payments

Payments in Billingrails are either online or offline. Online payments are processed through your own payment provider, we currently support Stripe and Paystack. Offline payments are handled externally and recorded manually on Billingrails either through the API or the dashboard.

Payment routing

Payment routing is the process of routing payments to the appropriate payment provider based on a set of rules defined by you. For example, you can set a rule to route all USD payments to Stripe and all NGN payments to Paystack.

Payment links

Payment links are no-code, Billingrails-hosted links you share with customers to make one-time payments or sign up for subscriptions.