Stripe billing implementation
Usage-based billing on your own Stripe — live in 2–3 weeks, not 6 months.
I'm a founding engineer who has built billing and payments systems for over two decades, including Stripe integrations since Stripe's early days. I implement metered and subscription billing directly inside your Stripe account: usage metering, pricing, invoicing, entitlements, customer portal, and dunning. No new billing vendor. No six-month rebuild.
Billing is where SaaS quietly bleeds time and money
Three patterns I see in nearly every early-stage SaaS before the rebuild.
Billing eats months and six figures
Building usage-based billing in-house routinely burns three to six engineering months and $200k+ before the first correct invoice ever goes out — time your team should be spending on the product.
Every pricing change becomes an engineering project
When metering, proration, and entitlements are hard-coded, a simple pricing experiment turns into a sprint. Your go-to-market gets gated by your backlog.
Revenue leaks silently
Failed payments that never retry, proration that's slightly off, metering that drifts — none of it throws an error. It just quietly erodes revenue you already earned.
What I implement on your Stripe
Everything runs on your own Stripe account — no middleware and no second system of record.
Usage metering
Reliable event ingestion and aggregation so every unit a customer uses is counted exactly once and billed correctly.
Pricing models
Tiered, volume, graduated, seat-based, hybrid, and prepaid-credit pricing modeled natively in Stripe.
Entitlements
Feature access tied to plans, turning capabilities on and off automatically as customers upgrade, downgrade, or churn.
Invoicing
Accurate, on-time invoices with proration, taxes, and credits handled precisely — not approximated.
Customer portal
A self-serve portal where customers manage plans, payment methods, and invoices without emailing support.
Dunning & recovery
Smart retries and dunning flows that recover failed payments before they turn into churn.
Why bring me in
The honest comparison.
vs. building it in-house
Your engineers are most valuable on your product, not relearning Stripe's metering and proration edge cases. I've shipped billing many times over two decades, so you skip the multi-month detour and the expensive first-invoice bugs.
vs. a billing platform (Metronome, Lago, Orb)
Those add a vendor, a recurring bill, and a system of record outside Stripe. I've used the alternatives and implement on the Stripe you already run — most teams simply don't need a second system.
vs. a generic Stripe freelancer
I've hand-rolled direct merchant integrations across many gateways, so I know exactly what Stripe handles for you and what it doesn't. Metering accuracy, proration, dunning, and entitlements are the work I specialize in — not a checkout wired up once between projects.
How we work together
One entry point: a paid Billing Teardown, usually less than the cost of one engineering sprint. It leads into a fixed-price build, with an optional retainer if your pricing keeps moving.
Billing Teardown
Paid · fixed scope
The entry point. A paid, fixed-scope engagement — usually less than the cost of one engineering sprint — with a concrete plan to implement billing on Stripe.
- Architecture for metering, pricing, and invoicing on your own Stripe
- Revenue-leak audit: failed payments, proration, metering drift
- A fixed-price implementation plan you can act on — with me or without me
Implementation
Fixed price
I build it end-to-end on your own Stripe and ship it live in 2–3 weeks.
- Metering and usage pipelines
- Pricing models, plans, and entitlements
- Invoicing, customer portal, and dunning
- Documented hand-off — you own everything
Pricing Retainer
Optional · monthly
Ongoing support for teams whose pricing keeps evolving.
- New plans and pricing experiments
- Metering and entitlement changes
- Dunning and recovery tuning
- A billing engineer on call without spinning up a project each time
Billing I’ve shipped
BillingLogix and Meshes are live in production today — but they’re the latest of many SaaS products I’ve shipped over two decades, and billing has run through all of them.
BillingLogix→
Live nowBilling & invoicing SaaS I built end-to-end as the founding engineer — automated billing cycles, invoicing, subscription management, and multi-tenant architecture on a custom merchant-gateway platform with Stripe support. Live in production with paying customers and real financial transactions.
Meshes→
Live nowMulti-tenant SaaS on a production Stripe integration, built end-to-end — checkout, subscriptions, and metered billing across several different resource types, on an event-driven backend that keeps billing state in sync.
Two decades of billing before them
Custom billing infrastructure
Automated billing cycles, precise invoicing, and deliverable tracking for membership and subscription platforms.
Multi-tenant SaaS billing
Multi-tenant platforms where each tenant configures its own billing — plan levels, meters, and pricing setups — with metered pricing options and multiple gateways supported, Stripe included.
Webinar & meeting platforms
A live webinar and meeting platform billed with metered pricing — charging on attendees and the number of registrants per event.
Multi-processor checkout systems
Checkout integrated with Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, and Venmo, plus revenue features: upsells, downsells, cross-sells, and order bumps.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a usage-based billing implementation take?
Most implementations go live in 2–3 weeks, not the three to six months an in-house build typically takes. The exact timeline depends on how many pricing models and integrations you need, which I scope precisely in the Billing Teardown before any code is written.
Do you build on my own Stripe account?
Yes. Your billing — pricing, invoicing, payments, the customer portal, and dunning — runs entirely on your own Stripe account, with no third-party billing vendor in the middle. The metering and entitlement logic that Stripe can't handle on its own lives in your codebase, where it belongs — I build that integration directly into your stack and hand it off documented. You own the Stripe account, the data, and the code.
What does the Billing Teardown include?
The Teardown is a paid, fixed-scope review of your current or planned billing setup — usually less than the cost of one engineering sprint. You get a concrete architecture for metering, pricing, and invoicing on Stripe, a list of revenue leaks to close, and a fixed-price implementation plan. It stands on its own even if you decide to build the rest yourself.
How is this different from Metronome, Lago, or Orb?
Those are billing platforms you integrate and pay for indefinitely. I implement billing directly on Stripe, which you already use — no extra vendor, no per-event pricing, and no data living in someone else's system. If a dedicated platform is genuinely right for your scale, I'll tell you that in the Teardown.
What pricing models can you implement?
Usage-based and metered billing, seat-based and tiered subscriptions, hybrid plans, prepaid credits, volume and graduated pricing, and entitlements that gate features by plan. If you can describe how you want to charge, I can model it in Stripe.
What happens after launch?
The implementation is yours — documented and running on your own Stripe — so you can take it from there. If your pricing keeps changing, the optional Pricing Retainer covers ongoing changes, new plans, and metering adjustments without standing up a new project each time.
Let’s get your billing right
Start with a paid Billing Teardown: a concrete plan to implement usage-based billing on your own Stripe, plus a fixed-price quote to build it. The Teardown is usually less than the cost of one engineering sprint.