The billing space is evolving and growing rapidly, and subscription billing is no exception. One of the most frequently requested features we get at Recurly is for “metered billing”. Metered billing is the act of charging customers monthly based on their usage of a service, similar to a cell phone plan or electricity bill. These models can take many forms ranging from one purely based on usage to a model that combines a monthly fee with a component of usage based/metered billing.

While listening to customer feedback, we discovered that most cases of metered billing or usage-based billing can be supported today with Recurly through a combination of a subscription and one-time charges via our API.  For technical details and code examples, please see our how to guide (http://support NULL.recurly NULL.com/faqs/subscription-plans/metered-billing).

At the moment, a variety of billing scenarios can easily be supported using our API.  This is only the first iteration; we’re working on making metered billing a first class citizen in our API.  If you have any feedback or questions, please drop us a line at support@recurly.com (support null@null recurly NULL.com).