<aside> 💡 Every company has slightly different settings in their usage-based billing products, so please work with your Data Solutions team member to work through your specific settings to ensure Subscript Billing works as desired.

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Overview

Subscript can calculate and generate your invoices for usage-based products based on their pricing plans and actual usage. This article presents an overview on the topics below:

• Core concepts of the Subscript Usage-Based Billing Engine
• Basic set up of pricing plans and subscriptions
• Sending events to Subscript
• Generating invoices

Pricing Plans, Subscriptions and Events

The core concepts of Subscript Usage-Based Billing are:

• Pricing Plans, where you tell Subscript how to charge the customer for the usage events volume. This can done per unit, tiered, and also use a formula (eg., you want to charge your customers 0.5% of their usage volume, or charge your customers at $0.10 per event just after they pass a specific threshold).
• Subscriptions, where you configure for each of your customers that have an event-based subscription:
  • The pricing plan to use
  • (Optional) Trial units
  • Start and end date for the subscription
• Events, that you’ll send to Subscript so it can calculate and charge your customer periodically (monthly or another cadence).

Setting up your first subscription

<aside> 💡 You can access access all features mentioned in this section under Billing > Usage-Based Engine.

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There are two steps to this:

1. Creating your desired pricing plan, under Create > Pricing Plan. This is where the most complicated settings lie. You may have several pricing plans, depending on the type of contract you have with your customers, but you can also have just one pricing plan and all your usage-based subscriptions associated with it. Pricing plans have a Bill in advance option*.* By default, we count usage events and create invoices at the end of each billing period. If you want to instead create invoices at start of each billing period, you should check the box. Learn more about Tiered and Prepaid pricing plans: Tiered pricing plans for usage-based subscriptions.
2. Then adding the customer subscription, in Create > Subscription.