Setting Component Allocations
In order for Chargify to assess charges for your Components, you must report to us the Component’s status (i.e. quantity used or allocated, or whether the feature was enabled or not) for each Subscription.
Components get “post-billed” (after usage) on the next billing cycle date, so if your Customer subscribed to the parent Product on the 23rd of the month, then he’ll get billed for any Components on the 23rd of each month, assuming the product is on monthly billing cycle. Chargify simply looks at the quantity on the billing date and then bills accordingly.
Future releases may allow for proration of added/removed units, averaging of the count, “high-water mark”, 95th percentile, etc. There are a number of approaches we’ve heard about that will be interesting to consider.
Reporting Metered Component usage
For Metered Components, you tell our API every time your customer uses some “widgets” (units). At the end of the billing period, Chargify will bill your customer for the total number of widgets reported, and then we will reset the widget count to zero and the whole process starts over for the new billing period.
Note: this differs from Quantity-based Components, which DO NOT reset to zero at the start of every billing period.
You can report metered usage in the Admin UI by navigating to a subscription and selecting the “Components (Line-Items)” tab. This will display a list of all the available components.
Click the ‘Ops’ button to reveal the context navigation and click the ‘Record Usage’ link.
Fill in a quantity and an memo and press ‘Record’. All recorded usage for a billing period will be tallied and charged at the end of the period.
The API calls required to report usage are detailed in API: Metered Usage.
Reporting Quantity-based allocations
For Quantity-based Components, you tell our API every time your customer changes the quantity of “widgets” (units) being utilized, but the assumption is that those widgets stay in use by your customer forever, until some future change.
A common use-case is software license fees, where you want to collect $100/month for each employee of your customer who accesses your service. So you might set the quanity to 3 and Chargify will bill your customer $300 every billing period until you change the quantity.
Note: this differs from Metered Components, which DO reset to zero at the start of every billing period.
Quantity component allocations can be updated using the Admin UI by selecting the component from the “Components (Line-Items)” tab when viewing a subscription.
The API calls required to report allocated quantities are detailed in API: Quantity Alocations.
Reporting On/Off component status
You report the status if On/Off Components (i.e. “enabled” or not) similarly to Quantity-based components. Instead of reporting a number for the allocated_quantity, you pass a boolean to enabled.
On/Off components can be toggled using the Admin UI by selecting the component from the “Components (Line-Items)” tab when viewing a subscription.
The API calls required to report allocated quantities are detailed in API: Quantity Alocations (they behave much like Quantity-based allocations).