Why teams choose Flexprice over Stripe Billing?

AI companies are moving fast. They are shipping new features weekly, automating workflows, adapting to user feedback, and scaling usage across teams and geographies. AI companies today are dealing with real-time, variable infrastructure costs from GPUs and cloud providers. As a result, usage-based pricing has become a necessity rather than a choice. Customers now expect to pay only for what they use, and per-seat pricing no longer reflects how AI products deliver value. By 2024, over 85% of AI companies had adopted some form of usage-based or hybrid pricing models.

Stripe Billing works well for traditional SaaS with fixed plans and seat-based pricing. But AI companies need real-time usage metering, flexible credit systems and feature-level controls. Conventional billing systems weren’t built to handle this level of flexibility.

That’s where Flexprice comes in. We’re building an open-source metering and billing platform for AI and agentic companies to monetize their products.

Let’s dive into the differences.

1. Metering & Usage Ingestion
   Flexprice makes it easy to track and price dynamic infrastructure workloads (tokens, GPU seconds, API calls), even at scale.
   
   

   Capability	Stripe Billing	Flexprice
   Usage event schema	❌ Strict 1:1 event-to-metric mapping	✅ Flexible schema
   Usage window aggregation	⚠️ Supports SUM and COUNT , LATEST only	✅ Supports SUM, COUNT, LATEST ,COUNT UNIQUE, MAX, ROLLING AVG and Custom agg
   Usage reset frequency	❌ Not available	✅ Supports both Cumulative (persists value acoss billing cycles) and Periodic (reset aggregation at the start of each billing cycle)
   Real-time usage visibility	❌ No event-level usage records, making it difficult to analyze usage patterns and revenue drivers.	✅ Built-in Event debugger

   
   
   

2. Pricing Model Flexibility
   Whether you’re launching new pricing, experimenting with feature-based tiers, or managing contracts across geographies, Flexprice lets you iterate without rewriting code.
   
   

   Capability	Stripe Billing	Flexprice
   Hybrid plans (fixed + usage)	❌ Workarounds needed by creating multiple subscriptions	✅ Fully supported
   Credit-based pricing	❌ Lacks essential prepaid credit features, including real-time credit balance, rollover, overage and non-monetary credit support.	✅ One-time and recurring credits
   Multiple Billing period in single subscription	❌ All items in a subscription must share the same billing cycle.	✅ Mix and match annual subscriptions with monthly pay-as-you-go billing in a single contract.
   Bulk Pricing updates	❌ Bulk pricing updates are not supported, requiring custom scripts for migrations.	✅ Roll out global updates while preserving custom discounts and terms.
   Entitlements	❌ No support for plan-level feature access management.	✅ Fully supported
   Multi-dimensional pricing (region, tier, resource)	❌ Can’t charge by multiple variables without clunky workarounds.	✅ Fully supported
   Usage-based billing	⚠️ Supports aggregation and Invoice generation at the end of Billing period only leading to unpredictability and revenue loss	✅ Supports real-time aggregation and Invoice generation for better predictibility
   Add-ons, bundles, plan overrides	⚠️ Manual setup	✅ Customize pricing and discounts for specific contracts without hacks or custom logic.
   Discounts, tiers, rollover logic	⚠️ No built-in support for complex discounts, multi-year commits, or negotiated pricing terms for enterprise customers.	✅ Flexible and programmable
   Subscriptions	✅ Fully supported	✅ Fully supported

   
   

3. Invoicing & Financial Accuracy
   

   Capability	Stripe Billing	Flexprice
   Invoice detail granularity	⚠️ Supported at product level	✅ Custom line-items with breakdowns based on features and their pricing tears
   Backdated adjustments	❌ Not available	✅ Fully Supported
   Raw exports & auditability	❌ Hidden behind Stripe Sigma	✅ Supports export of all features, aggregation calculations for transparency to the users

   
   

4. Payment Infrastructure
   

   Capability	Stripe Billing	Flexprice
   Payment provider support	❌ Stripe-only	✅ Works with Stripe, Razorpay, PayPal, etc.
   Bring-your-own-invoicing	❌ Tied to Stripe only	✅ Yes

   
   

5. Developer Experience & Extensibility
   
   

   Capability	Stripe Billing	Flexprice
   Open-source	❌ Closed	✅ Fully open-source
   Capability to self-host	❌ No	✅ Yes
   Embeddable widgets	⚠️ Limited checkout page	✅ Pricing page, customer portal, usage UI
   Multi-tenant support	⚠️ One Stripe account per tenant	✅ True multi-tenant by design

Is Flexprice cheaper than Stripe Billing ?

We're not fans of Stripe Billing's "rent-seeker" pricing approach. This never scales with your business. Stripe Billing will cost you 0.5% (and up to 0.8%) of your transaction volume, on top of Stripe Payments (starts at 2.9% + $0.30 per successful card charge). With the full vendor lock-in of Stripe, you might stack dozens of fees that are directly impacting your own revenue. Once again, Stripe has 21 products and each of them has their own pricing.

Flexprice is an open-source platform. This means you can have a billing engine for free! In addition to this, Flexprice offers a cloud solution. We prefer to charge a fixed platform fee and a volume-based fee for the usage-based events ingested for the fully managed application.

Stripe Billing was made for a world of seats and tiers. Flexprice is made for:

• AI tools charging per token or per GPU second

• Devtools priced by GBs processed or containers deployed

• API-first startups offering credits, overages, and bundles

• Multi-tenant platforms with contract-specific pricing

Whether you’re early-stage or scaling to millions of events per day, Flexprice adapts with you.