Stripe Billing

What it is

Stripe Billing is the recurring side of Stripe. Where a normal invoicing tool helps you send a document and get paid once, Stripe Billing runs subscriptions: it charges the same customers on a schedule, handles plan changes and multi-phase schedules, sends invoices and quotes, and supports usage-based pricing through its meters.

The part that earns its keep is what happens when a charge fails. Cards expire, banks decline, and on a subscription business that is not an incident, it is a weekly event. Stripe Billing retries failed payments with machine learning driven Smart Retries, sends automatic reminders for missed payments, and gives customers a portal where they can update their own card and manage their own billing.

Who it's for (and who it isn't)

It fits businesses that charge the same customers repeatedly: software subscriptions, memberships, retainers billed by card, anything with usage-based pricing. If you already take payments through Stripe and you are tracking renewals in a spreadsheet, this is the piece you are missing.

It is a poor fit for the classic small-business invoicing job. If you send project invoices to a handful of clients and want them paid by bank transfer, this is heavier and more expensive machinery than you need, and Zoho Invoice or Wave will serve you better. It also assumes some technical comfort or a developer within reach, because the flexible parts are API-shaped.

Pricing

Stripe Billing is paid, and priced on billing volume rather than per user. Pay-as-you-go is 0.7% of billing volume with no recurring transaction fee, which suits irregular volumes. Monthly subscription tiers start at EUR 500 per month on a one-year contract for up to EUR 80,000 of billing volume, rising through EUR 1,200, EUR 2,350 and EUR 4,900 per month for higher volumes, with 0.67% charged on additional volume above the tier. Custom pricing exists for high volume. Prices as shown here were quoted in euros on the pricing page.

Two things to hold onto. Stripe payment processing is charged separately, so Billing is a layer on top of your card fees, not instead of them. And the committed tiers only make sense at volume, so most businesses start pay-as-you-go.

Set it up

Official guide: Create subscriptions

1. Create a Stripe account. Stripe Billing is Stripe's tool for charging customers on a repeating schedule. Start on pay-as-you-go: 0.7% of billing volume (the total amount you bill) with no recurring transaction fee. Stripe's payment processing fees are billed separately on each payment. After you sign up, you see the Stripe Dashboard, where you do every step below without code.
2. In the Stripe Dashboard, go to "More" > "Product catalogue" and click "+Add product". Enter the "Name" of what you sell. Keep the flat-rate "Pricing model" (one fixed price per unit), choose "Recurring", pick a "Billing period" such as monthly, and enter the price. Click "Add product". Your product now shows in the catalogue.
3. Go to the subscriptions page in the Dashboard and click "+Create subscription". A subscription is one customer paying for one product on a repeating schedule. Find or add the customer, enter the product and price, and set the start date. Stripe bills the customer from that date, so pick a customer you are ready to bill. Save the subscription. You now see it on the subscriptions page.
4. Go to "Billing" > "Revenue recovery" > "Retries" and use "Smart Retries", which tries a failed payment again at the times it works best. You choose how many tries within which period, from 1 week up to 2 months, and Stripe recommends 8 tries within 2 weeks. Failed payments now get retried on that schedule.
5. Open the revenue recovery settings page and turn on "Send emails when card payments fail". Stripe now emails your customer after each failed payment and gives them a way to update their payment method.
6. Go to the customer portal configuration page, a Stripe page where customers manage their own subscription and payment details. Click "Activate link" in the "Ways to get started" section, and put the link on your website or in your emails. Your customers can now update their card without contacting you.

When this works, your first customer is on a subscription that renews on its own, failed payments are tried again and the customer is emailed, and the customer has a link to update their own card.

Strengths and limitations

The strength is recovery. On subscription revenue, the difference between a good billing system and a bad one is mostly the percentage of failed charges that quietly succeed on a later attempt, and that is precisely what Smart Retries, automatic reminders and self-service card updates are for.

The limitations are fit and cost shape. It is not a bookkeeping tool, so accounting still lives elsewhere. Pricing on billing volume means the bill grows exactly as your revenue does, which is fine but should be modeled before you commit to a tier. And for one-off client invoicing it is simply the wrong instrument, which is worth saying plainly because the Stripe name pulls people toward it for jobs it was not built for.