Billing 2.0

[cooper667]

italics are outstanding questions. We should also confirm things like trial length and the cancellation terms.

We have 2 types of billing accounts, Upfront & Invoice. We also have 2 types of plan, Standard & Custom.

That gives us 4 types of account US, UC, IS, IC

Account Creation

Custom Plans start with the following:

0.The sales team create a custom product & price in Stripe, and create a Custom Plan Github Issue. Then the tech team add this and the limits as a STORE migration. The products and prices CAN be reused between custom plans, but it might be a good idea to just duplicate them? Custom plans are single use, we do a migration for each one. - Do we want to set a custom trial length here for these plans?

1. Account & Team creation. The Sales Team send them a link to sign up with that is tied to the custom plan created. This puts them on their plan for 30 days. ?We don't take any payment details here.?

Standard Plans start with the following:

1. Account & Team creation. This puts them on the Small Team plan for 30 days (the trial length can be manually updated thro the Stripe Dashboard by the Sales Team if needed). We don't take any payment details here.

Billing:

For Invoice Billing, the sales team set this up in Stripe (TODO @cooper667 document this process). At the end of the trial, an initial invoice is issued for £0? They are then invoiced:

• At the end of each month for the previous months plan + any usage over the included
• For a year? The annual plans should probably have a usage limit set so we can email or bill them if they get close?

For Upfront Billing: The user adds their card details at any time during the trial (or any other payment methods we accept, limited by Stripe Checkout). they then choose a plan and add ons, which will be restricted depending on how many users etc they have added during the trial.

If a user doesn't add their details we get notified 3 days before the trial end. The trials will have the usage limit set to whatever the Growing Plan storage limit is, if a team hits that, they need to add a payment method so we can charge them. Both of these scenarios should have a Copper integration so the sales team can email the customer.

In this setup, plans are billed for the upcoming month, and usage is billed for the previous month.

Notes:

• User accounts are suspended under the following conditions (a Copper notification should be set up to catch this):
  • Upfront accounts: Payment attempted & failed + 3 days grace period
  • Invoice Accounts: Payment not received for invoice + payment terms time period
• A user can't add addons to the free plan
• We can only really limit features with the distinction "paid plan"/"free plan" (like AUDIT is now). Anything that doesn't fall under this should probably be an Add-On?
• We can take payments outside of Stripe, however these Custom Plans should still be managed within Stripe, and manually reconciled.
• Cancelling (We want a Copper notification for this)
  • Upfront Billing - Anytime, you will be charged once more for your usage up to the end of the billing period. Account will remain active until that date.
  • Invoice Billing - Anytime, you will be invoiced at the end of the period for the current period and any usage.

[hy789x]

Is this useful / the best way to respond?

1) I don't think any bespoke plan will be paid via card online and will always be invoice so there are probably only 3 types. 2) With the above in mind I don't think we need to think about payment details on any customs 3) I think a standard "free trial" is either 14 days or 1 month for all plan types - i think 14 days is better for revenue but happily go with 30 if we feel it's more of a hook 4) no initial invoice for £0 perhaps the 12 month contract always starts after the trial period ends? 5) Invoicing - in an ideal world we would have the options to invoice monthly, quarterly and annually. It should be in ADVANCE - invoice goes out once the clock is ticking

[cooper667]

OK that makes thinks simpler I think?

Invoice & Upfront are both invoiced at the end of the trial/the start of the period, and the only difference is that Upfront is charged at that point, whereas Invoice can be paid anytime up to the payment terms

For 3, that is easy to change so we can play with that as we go.

4. Yea this works now we're invoicing up front
5. :+1:

[ChasNelson1990]

Did we confirm that we should offer monthly and annual product lines? We should use the price lines we have as the "monthly cost if paid annually" equivalent to 11 months so the "monthly cost if paid monthly" becomes £275 and £875 respectively.

[ChasNelson1990]

Excluding VAT