Stripe vs. Flexprice: The Better Fit for Hybrid and Credit-Based Models

Stripe made subscriptions easy. It gave developers a clean way to set up recurring payments without building everything from scratch. For seat-based pricing and flat monthly plans, it’s still hard to beat.

But SaaS pricing has evolved. Credits, usage-based limits, and dynamic entitlements are now standard. What once looked like a simple “plan” has turned into a bundle of features, credits, and usage thresholds that reset, roll over, and change often.

This post talks about where Stripe’s plan-based model starts to show cracks for today's use cases, and how Flexprice is built to handle these pricing structures out of the box from the get go.

Feature Entitlements

Stripe was built for seat-based pricing, simple flat subscriptions.

Modern SaaS runs on hybrid models: a base plan plus usage-based components like credits or compute time. Plans are now dynamic entitlements tied to infrastructure usage.

Stripe’s plan-centric architecture just doesn’t work here. It can’t natively model feature-level entitlements or enforce usage limits, forcing teams to patch together custom metering and billing logic.

Let’s take InVideo’s pricing as an example. Each tier doesn’t just define a price, it controls how many credits a user gets, how many video minutes they can process, and how much access they have to generative video features.

• Plus Plan: 10 credits, 50 video minutes, 30 seconds of generative video.

• Max Plan: 40 credits, 200 video minutes, 120 seconds of generative video.

• Generative Plan: 100 credits, 300 seconds of generative video.

• Team Plan: 1000 credits, 50 minutes of generative video.

This structure is already more complex than Stripe’s default pricing model can handle because every plan combines multiple entitlements credits, minutes, and feature access all with their own limits.

Now, if you had to build this with Stripe

Here’s what it would take:

1. Create a separate plan for each combination of credits and video minutes

   • One for Plus (10 credits, 50 mins)

   • One for Max (40 credits, 200 mins)

   • And so on for Generative and Team

2. Add generative video as another “metered feature” per plan

   • Stripe doesn’t let you define “30 seconds vs. 120 seconds” of usage per plan without building custom logic.

   • You’d have to track it manually and sync with Stripe invoices.

3. Experimentation becomes painful

   • If you change Max credits from 40 to 60, every cloned plan, entitlement reference must be updated across your billing and invoices.

The complexity compounds as soon as you introduce even two variables (credits + video minutes) plus a third feature (generative video). What looks simple on InVideo’s pricing page becomes 4–6 separate Stripe plans plus custom metering scripts.

How Flexprice Handles It

With Flexprice:

• You define credits, video minutes, and generative video as separate entitlements

• In every plan you simply link the feature as an entitlement with specified usage limits along with the usage reset period if necessary

• Add-ons work out-of-the-box; a user can buy extra credits or minutes without touching their base plan

• Usage tracking is automatic; credits, video minutes, and generative limits are all monitored and handled without building custom infrastructure

• And if you want to experiment with pricing, you can update the entitlement once, and Flexprice updates it everywhere

Your engineering team doesn’t waste cycles syncing pricing logic across multiple layers; it all lives in one open-source system designed for dynamic SaaS and AI workflows.

Recurring & One-Time Credits

Credit-based pricing is common for AI and SaaS platforms. Instead of charging per feature or API call directly, companies allocate credits that customers spend as they consume resources (e.g., 1 video export = 5 credits).

There are typically three types of credits in such systems:

• Sign-up credits – Free credits given during account creation or trials

• Promotional credits – Bonus credits for campaigns or referrals

• Paid credits – Credits purchased directly, either as a one-time pack or recurring monthly allocation

Where Stripe Falls Short:

• Stripe supports one-time credits (via Customer Balance Transactions) and promotional credits, but there’s no native way to offer recurring credits tied to monthly or annual subscriptions

• Credit rollover is impossible. If a user doesn’t use all credits this month, Stripe doesn’t allow automatic carry-over to the next cycle

• No wallet threshold logic. You can’t set “minimum wallet balances” to automatically top up when the balance drops below a certain amount or trigger alerts

• Every aspect of credit tracking; allocation, expiry, consumption, and top-ups must be built outside Stripe, increasing complexity

How Stripe Handles It

To simulate recurring credits or wallet thresholds, you’d have to build your own credit management layer and wire it to Stripe’s APIs:

• Recurring Credits Hack:

  • Use Stripe’s subscription events (e.g., invoice.payment_succeeded) as a trigger to manually allocate credits in your database each month

  • Handle rollover logic yourself (carry unused credits, enforce expiry)

• Wallet Threshold Monitoring:

  • Continuously track customer balances on your own system.

  • When a balance falls below your threshold:

    • Create a charge to the customer’s default payment method

    • Apply that amount as a credit via the Customer Balance Transactions API

    • Adjust the customer’s wallet balance and reflect it in your product dashboard

  • Example flow:

    • Monitor balances via webhooks or cron jobs

    • Create a PaymentIntent to charge the saved card when balance < X

    • Once successful, add credits manually as a ledger adjustment

• No Native Alerts: You’d have to implement notifications for low balances using custom logic and event triggers

How Flexprice Solves It

• Native Recurring Credits:

  • Allocate monthly or annual recurring credits automatically as part of a subscription or plan (e.g., 2,000 credits per month)

  • Credits can roll over with configurable caps (e.g., unused credits roll over up to 5,000 max)

• Built-in Credit Wallets:

  • Track sign-up, promotional, and paid credits in one wallet with full transparency

  • Credits can expire automatically based on rules (e.g., promotional credits expire in 30 days)

• Threshold Alerts & Auto Top-ups:

  • Define minimum balance thresholds (e.g., auto top-up when wallet < 100 credits)

Custom Credits

When you introduce credits, sign-up, promotional, and paid you initially treat them as simple tokens of value. They work well to allocate usage, but soon another challenge surfaces: your underlying infra costs aren’t uniform.

• Use Case 1: Creating a table uses 50 tokens but costs you almost nothing in GPU time

• Use Case 2: Enriching rows uses fewer tokens but significantly more GPU, making it expensive on your side

Yet you charge the customer the same way. And eventually someone from your finance team highlights this issue, “We’re bleeding money on certain actions because the cost to run them is higher than what we bill for.”

And for you the obvious fix is charge per resource directly, per token, per GPU second, per premium model.

• $0.01 per token

• $0.10 for <10 GPU seconds, $0.15 for 10–15s, $0.25 for >15s

But now your pricing page reads like a data center tariff sheet too complex for anyone to understand.

But when a customer gets a $100 bill and thinks, ““I don’t understand what I’m being charged for. Tokens? GPU seconds? Why is this so complicated?”

And it results in lost trust and churn, even if the pricing is technically fair.

To simplify, you stop exposing tokens, GPU seconds, or model costs to customers. Instead, you abstract everything into credits.

• 1 credit = $0.05

• Table creation = 50 credits

• Row enrichment = 100 credits

• Premium model call = 200 credits

Internally, you still map credits to infra cost variables, but the user only sees:

“You used 2,000 credits this month = $100.”

This model keeps your pricing predictable for customers while protecting margins on the backend.

How Flexprice Powers This

• Credits as a native abstraction layer: Tokens, GPU time, and other variables are auto-converted to credits

• Support for fiat and custom pricing: Credits can map to dollars, rupees, or non-monetary units

• Dynamic pricing updates: Adjust the credit cost of actions without touching plans or usage rules

• Cleaner invoicing: Customers see a single credit balance instead of 4–5 line items with technical metrics

The Clean Way to Handle Pricing Complexity

Stripe will always have its place, it’s reliable, battle-tested, and perfect for simple subscriptions. But as soon as your pricing moves beyond flat plans, Stripe demands workarounds, custom scripts, and manual syncs that drain engineering time.

Flexprice was built for this new reality, where entitlements, credits, and usage-based pricing are the norm. It removes the complexity while giving you full control and visibility. No cloned plans, no duct tape, just a system that adapts as your pricing evolves.

If you’re tired of fighting your billing stack every time you run an experiment or roll out a new feature, it might be time to see what Flexprice can do.

→ Book a quick demo or check out our GitHub repo to see how Flexprice can power your pricing in minutes.