Billing credits allow you to offer credits as a pricing structure to your customers.

Billing credits are only available to users on our new Billing plans. Users on legacy Billing Starter or Scale plans will need to upgrade to access this feature. Contact your Stripe account executive if you have questions about changing your contract.

Terms to know

• Credit funding is the process of collecting money from a customer to add to their credit balance (for example, for a prepaid contract). Note that you can also give customers credits for free as a promotional credit.
• Credit application is the process of applying customer’s credits in order to pay for part or all of an invoice.

How Stripe charges for this

Public preview period (beginning October 2024):

• Credit funding: Your standard Invoicing and Payments processing fees apply if you’re funding credits through Stripe Payments or Stripe Invoicing.
• Credit application: Applied Billing credit amounts do not count toward your Billing volume charges.

General availability (H1 2025):

• Credit funding: Your standard Invoicing and Payments processing fees apply if you’re funding credits through Stripe Payments or Stripe Invoicing.
• Credit application: Applied credit amounts count towards your Billing volume charges. You'll be charged based on your current Billing rate for the amount of credits applied to invoices. This ensures consistent pricing whether you collect revenue upfront or in arrears.
  • For users on Pay as you go plans, you'll be charged your standard Billing rate for applied credits.
  • For users on subscription-based plans, applied credits will count against your Billing volume entitlement.

Example

As an example, let’s say you're on our standard pay-as-you-go Billing offering with a 0.7% fee rate:

During public preview:

• You create a customer credit grant for $10,000, and charge the customer via Stripe Invoicing. You will pay the applicable Payment processing and Invoicing fees for the $10,000.
• If your customer now gets a bill of $12,000 with $10,000 paid with credits and $2,000 paid with a credit card, you will pay $14 (0.7% of $2,000).

During general availability:

• You create a customer credit grant for $10,000, and charge the customer via Stripe Invoicing. You will pay the applicable Payment processing and Invoicing fees for the $10,000.
• If your customer now gets a bill of $12,000 with $10,000 paid with credits and $2,000 paid with a credit card, you will pay $84 (0.7% of $12,000).