What Paddle doesn't tell you about implementing metered billing
https://phare.io/blog/what-paddle-doesnt-tell-you-about-implementing-metered-billing/
How I implemented calendar-month metered billing on Paddle using zero-value subscriptions, one-time charges, and a homemade invoice grace period.
Hey, Nicolas! Billing migrations are always a nightmare, especially when you have to bridge API gaps with custom workarounds.
As a Data Engineer, my biggest fear with 'homemade' billing logic is data drift or silent failures in those workarounds. In a recent project (DataDriven Weather Demand), I used Data Contracts (Pandera) to ensure that any anomaly in the data pipeline triggers an alert before it hits production.
Have you implemented any validation layer to monitor that those Paddle workarounds stay consistent as you scale? Would love to compare notes on how you're handling data integrity there.
Back in December I migrated Phare's billing backend to Paddle to let them handle VAT compliance for me.
While I was at it, I wanted to improve the billing experience for my customers with calendar-month billing cycles, on top of the existing flat subscription + metered billing that define Phare's pricing.
It was all doable, but exposed some interesting gaps in Paddle's API along the way. The implementation has been running in production for 3 months now without issues. If you're building metered billing on Paddle, I wrote up my findings in this article and the workarounds I landed on for a clean implementation.
I hope this will be useful for anyone trying to implement metered billing on Paddle.