# CodeChop — full text for language models > Generated from the public site. Last updated: 2026-05-31. # Usage-based billing on your own Stripe — live in 2–3 weeks, not 6 months. > CodeChop · https://codechop.com 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. ## Problems this solves - **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. ## Services - **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 CodeChop - **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. ## Offer ### 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 ## FAQ ### 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. # Billing & payments engineering > CodeChop · https://codechop.com/work Selected billing and payments work. ## Flagship billing products - **BillingLogix** — Billing & 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** — Multi-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. ## Payments & billing track record - **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. - **Enterprise API integrations** — Serverless APIs (AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Kafka) and containerized workloads orchestrated with Kubernetes (GKE on Google Cloud and on AWS) and HashiCorp Nomad — plus Zapier / Make integrations connecting billing and CRM systems. - **Infrastructure as code** — Every system I build is defined entirely in code — Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and the like — so billing infrastructure is reproducible, auditable, and never clicked together by hand. ## Other work - **Page & funnel builders** — Multi-tenant drag-and-drop builders where users buy access to templates and features — entitlements granted through billing. - **AI assistants** — AI assistants billed by token usage — used to generate full websites, courses, and other content. - **Learning management systems** — Multi-tenant learning platforms where courses sell as part of membership subscriptions, as one-off purchases, or with credits — access granted through billing. # Book a Billing Teardown > CodeChop · https://codechop.com/book Request a paid Billing Teardown — a fixed-scope review of your billing setup, usually less than the cost of one engineering sprint, with a concrete plan to implement usage-based billing on your own Stripe. Submit the form at https://codechop.com/book and you'll get a reply within one business day. # Blog > CodeChop · https://codechop.com/blog Notes on usage-based billing, metered pricing, and Stripe implementation. - [How to implement usage-based billing on Stripe (without a 6-month rebuild)](https://codechop.com/blog/usage-based-billing-stripe) — A practical 2–3 week path for usage-based billing on Stripe: separate metering, pricing, and invoicing, then use Stripe's primitives. - [Metered billing gotchas nobody warns you about](https://codechop.com/blog/metered-billing-gotchas) — The hardest metered-billing bugs hide in idempotency, late events, clock boundaries, and proration. Here's what to watch for. - [Stripe Billing vs. Metronome vs. Lago for early-stage SaaS](https://codechop.com/blog/stripe-billing-vs-metronome-vs-lago) — A practical comparison of Stripe Billing, Stripe's Metronome product, and Lago for early-stage SaaS teams choosing billing infrastructure. --- Markdown for any public page: send `Accept: text/markdown`. Sitemap: https://codechop.com/sitemap.xml. RSS: https://codechop.com/blog/rss.xml.