■ Stripe Billing Engineering · Not a Stripe Checkout install
Stripe is live. The hard part starts now — metering, proration, dunning, tax, reconciliation.
Invoice · Engagement scope · Draft
#BILL-2026-001
■ Talk to the lead architect
Webhooks dropping, metering misfiring, or mid-migration on a billing platform? Bring it directly to Ritesh — no SDR, no qualification call.
Ritesh Agarwal · Lead Architect, Appycodes · LinkedIn
■ What you get
Six engagements. Each one a separate billing discipline.
01
Stripe Billing builds
Checkout, Customer Portal, Tax, Connect for marketplaces. Real plan/coupon/promo logic, not a Stripe Checkout drop-in.
02
Usage-based & metered billing
Including modelling the unit economics before the billing schema is locked. Per-user, per-event, per-minute, per-MB — whichever the product actually charges on.
03
Subscription migrations
Stripe ↔ Zoho ↔ WCS ↔ Chargebee ↔ Recurly. Renewal cadence preserved, payment methods migrated where the gateway permits, proration state honoured.
04
Webhook reliability
Idempotency keys, replay handling, retry, dead-letter queues, audit logs. The boring part that costs the most money when it breaks.
05
Dunning engineering
Smart retry windows, customer-friendly recovery emails, store-credit application, fallback charge methods. Recovers the renewals others write off.
06
Reconciliation
Stripe events → application database → accounting (Xero / QuickBooks / Zoho Books). End-of-month closes in hours, not days.
▼ Per-User Cost Curve
Three pricing models. One curve tells you which one you actually have.
Modelled per-user cost across 0 → 10,000 users for flat-fee, tiered, and usage-based structures. The Mux-derived usage curve plateaus at $4.42/user/month at scale — unrecoverable if your pricing was set assuming flat.
Inflection: flat-fee under-charges past 2,000 users; tiered over-charges between 500 and 1,000; usage-based stabilises only past 5,000.
■ Evidence
Three engagements. Three different billing disciplines.
Combinatorial matrix · 40K+ subs
PlusHeat — Zoho orchestration
Plan × homeowner/landlord × call-out excess × monthly/annual × add-ons × promo × DD/card. Orchestration layer between marketing site, customer, and Zoho — source-of-truth discipline, idempotent webhook handling, promo stacking that doesn't leak revenue.
Store credit · SQL gotchas
INSPIRELLE — store credit recovery
Mapping coupon amounts back to renewal totals via raw SQL: wp_postmeta where post_title = coupon_code joined to meta_key = 'coupon_amount'. Resolved MySQL collation errors (#1267 — Illegal mix of collations) on the join. Real engineering, not a plugin install.
Cost modelling first
Player Profile Hub — Mux economics
Modelled $0.003/min storage, $0.0008/min delivery blended, 100K free minutes/month, 75% watch-rate cap, 50/50 720p/1080p blend (0.9 factor). Baseline: $4.42/user/month at 10 views/min. Delivered as Word report + interactive React calculator on Vite + React 18 + Tailwind.
Pair this with WooCommerce Subscriptions (the recovery layer underneath), SaaS web app development, and API & integration work for the webhook + reconciliation infrastructure.
■ Good fit if
- Teams with Stripe live who need the next layer — metering, proration, multi-currency, reconciliation
- Products with usage-based pricing where the unit economics need modelling before billing ships
- Operators migrating between billing platforms without losing renewal cadence
- Engineering teams who want webhook reliability done by someone who has shipped it three times
■ Probably not a fit
- First-time Stripe Checkout install with no subscription, no metering, no tax complexity — read the Stripe docs
- Stores under $100K ARR where the engineering cost outpaces the recovered revenue
- Teams looking for someone to copy-paste the Stripe quickstart
■ Tools we use
Stripe by default. The others when the buyer made that decision already.
■ If Stripe is live and something's off
Bring the failure mode. We'll diagnose inside a call.
■ Other services
We build a lot more than this.
Explore the rest of what we build.
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