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Flexprice

Usage-based pricing and metering for developers

Open SourceSaaSArtificial Intelligence
2025-04-06
121 likes

Product Introduction

  1. Flexprice is a billing platform designed to streamline the implementation and iteration of pricing models without requiring extensive engineering resources. It provides tools for usage-based metering, credit management, and subscription billing while integrating with existing payment systems like Stripe and Chargebee. The platform supports both cloud-hosted and self-hosted deployments, offering flexibility for different infrastructure preferences. Its no-code UI enables non-technical teams to configure pricing plans and feature access controls independently.

  2. The core value of Flexprice lies in its ability to eliminate development bottlenecks associated with billing system overhauls. By abstracting complex billing logic into a modular platform, it allows engineering teams to focus on product development rather than building and maintaining custom billing infrastructure. It empowers businesses to experiment with hybrid pricing strategies (usage-based, credit-based, or seat-based) and rapidly adapt to market demands. The platform’s architecture is optimized for high-volume event processing, handling millions of API requests monthly with consistent reliability.

Main Features

  1. Flexprice enables granular usage metering by allowing users to define custom events such as API calls, compute time, or application-specific actions. The system processes and aggregates usage data in real time using horizontally scalable infrastructure capable of ingesting over 10,000 events per second. Users can visualize consumption patterns through integrated dashboards and apply this data to dynamic pricing calculations. This feature supports prorated billing cycles and automated reconciliation with accounting systems.

  2. The platform offers advanced credit management through configurable workflows for prepaid credits, promotional balances, and automated top-up triggers. Users can set expiration policies for unused credits, create tiered bonus structures, and enforce spending limits at customer or team levels. Credit balances integrate directly with pricing plans, enabling hybrid models where usage charges deduct from allocated credits before triggering overage billing. This system maintains audit trails for all credit adjustments and supports multi-currency transactions.

  3. Flexprice provides a unified environment for designing and testing pricing plans through its version-controlled configuration system. Teams can create base pricing templates with seat-based fees, usage tiers, and feature entitlements, then apply customer-specific overrides through API or UI. The platform automatically generates invoices that combine recurring subscription charges with usage-based line items, including detailed breakdowns of credit utilization. A/B testing capabilities allow comparing revenue impacts of different pricing strategies before full deployment.

Problems Solved

  1. Flexprice addresses the engineering overhead required to implement and modify complex billing systems, which traditionally requires weeks of development time for each pricing model change. It eliminates the need to build custom event ingestion pipelines, usage aggregation systems, and credit management logic from scratch. The platform prevents billing discrepancies caused by manual data reconciliation between separate metering, pricing, and invoicing tools.

  2. The primary target users are SaaS companies and API-first businesses requiring flexible monetization strategies for technical products. Development teams at scaleups needing to implement enterprise-grade billing without dedicated backend resources benefit significantly. Product managers and growth teams seeking to experiment with pricing models without engineering dependencies form another key user group.

  3. Typical use cases include transitioning from flat-rate to usage-based pricing without code changes, managing prepaid credit systems for developer platforms, and enforcing feature access based on real-time usage thresholds. Enterprises use Flexprice to handle regional pricing variations across different markets while maintaining a unified billing infrastructure. API companies leverage it to automatically invoice clients based on millions of daily API calls with precise attribution.

Unique Advantages

  1. Unlike closed-source billing platforms, Flexprice combines open-source flexibility with enterprise-grade scalability, allowing full inspection and modification of its billing engine. The architecture supports pluggable components where users can replace default modules (e.g., event queues, databases) with their own infrastructure while retaining core functionality. This contrasts with SaaS-only competitors that force vendor lock-in for critical billing operations.

  2. The platform introduces real-time feature gating that ties product functionality directly to usage metrics and subscription entitlements. Engineers can enforce rate limits, access controls, and service tiers through standardized SDKs rather than building custom middleware. Its distributed metering system guarantees exactly-once event processing semantics even during network partitions or system failures.

  3. Competitive advantages include native support for multi-environment workflows (development/staging/production) with isolated billing data and configuration versions. Pre-built connectors for Stripe Billing, Chargebee, and Snowflake reduce integration time from weeks to hours. The system’s open-core model provides 99.95% SLA guarantees for self-hosted deployments, a feature absent in most open-source alternatives.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

  1. How does Flexprice handle high-volume event ingestion? The platform uses a distributed architecture with Kafka-like event streaming and parallel processing workers, capable of handling over 1.2 billion API requests monthly. Events are batched, compressed, and stored in columnar format for efficient aggregation. Automatic retries and dead-letter queues ensure no data loss during peak loads or transient failures.

  2. Can we use Flexprice alongside our existing Stripe subscription setup? Yes, Flexprice integrates with Stripe through bidirectional sync of customer data, invoices, and payment records. The platform can augment Stripe’s capabilities by adding usage-based billing components while preserving existing subscription workflows. Webhooks trigger real-time updates between systems when usage thresholds or credit balances change.

  3. What security measures protect billing data in self-hosted deployments? Flexprice supports private VPC deployments with encryption at rest using customer-managed keys. Role-based access control (RBAC) limits configuration changes to authorized team members, while audit logs track all billing adjustments. The system is SOC 2 Type II compliant and provides optional integration with enterprise SSO providers.

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Flexprice - Usage-based pricing and metering for developers | ProductCool