TL;DR: Nadles has recently released its new billing engine. It’s the most advanced API monetization engine at the moment. The flexibility of pricing strategies configurable on Nadles is unparalleled. It can do what Stripe and Paddle can’t. You should try it.
Overview
The world of pricing strategies for APIs is extremely diverse. Many times we saw API providers struggling to set up their pricing model with existing solutions. Sometimes it requires extensive coding, sometimes it’s not possible at all.
Examples?
Annual flat fee and monthly overages in the same subscription: users pay the fee once a year, use the API, and you charge them for usage monthly. This model makes a lot of sense from both customer and provider perspectives, but it presents a challenge to implement with commonly-used tools.
Or imagine that you’d like to offer your users a one-time trial package which includes X API calls. Or, you’d like to measure consumption and overages daily and collect a payment for the total amount once a month.
Add to the list of requirements the ability to bill for something besides API calls, have endpoints with different prices, charge setup fees, calculate usage for each request dynamically on the fly, etc.
The amount of effort to implement all of the above can make it feel like implementing the monetization strategy requires significantly more work than building the API itself.
Also, keep in mind that nailing the pricing on the first try is uncommon. Finding product-market fit will inevitably require you to experiment with your pricing to find the most suitable strategy, which means reimplementing it, potentially from scratch.
New features
Billing 2.0 is a complete overhaul of Nadles’ component responsible for handling subscriptions and payments, which makes it real to implement and conduct experiments with your API pricing strategy by simply configuring it. All new features outlined below extend the list of existing capabilities like recurring billing, pay per use, automated metering and ready-made payment integrations with Stripe and Paddle.
One-off prices
This is useful when you need to:
- Charge one-time subscription fees
- Implement prepaid models that allow your customers to purchase a certain volume of API calls, credits, or whatever billable metric you find suitable, use them and top up when the balance is exhausted.
- Offer a trial product with a certain volume of units included.
Nadles charges the amount once and, if you enable that, allows your customers to buy more items later.
Subscription upgrades and downgrades
Billing 2.0 enables subscription upgrades and downgrades.
You can control, whether the customers subscribed to a particular product can switch their subscriptions to another product. Nadles will automatically calculate the amounts, prorations for the unused time, bill for the used items and initiate payments.
Read more in our documentation.
Separate aggregation schedule for pay per use
This feature allows to separate billing and aggregation schedules for pay-as-you-go products.
Consider the following pricing: 1000 requests/day included,
then 0.001 USD/request.
In this example, overages are calculated for each day, but collecting payments daily would mean that the user will see a huge list of transactions on the bank statement and you, the API provider, will have to pay much more in Stripe fees, as Stripe charges a minimum fixed fee of about $0.3 per transaction.
The solution is to calculate overages daily and charge user’s credit card for the total amount once a month.
See the difference on the diagrams below.
When aggregation schedule = billing schedule:
When aggregation schedule != billing schedule:
Updating payment methods
We also added a button to update payment methods on the subscription dashboard. It works seamlessly for both Stripe and Paddle.
Transaction history
A concise table at the bottom of subscription dashboard shows your users the whole history of charges, credits and received payments.
Future extension
This update allows us to extend the engine further and have greater control over the features of the billing engine, which, in turn, allows us to make your lives easier.
Check it out now on www.nadles.com, read our docs and subscribe to our X account.
