I think this is stripe fixing the huge shortcomings in usage based billing that confuse our users. Right now we have to create a subscription and then they get billed $0/month... unless they have usage, in which case they are billed for the usage. The new meters api starts by saying "Unlike usage records, billing meters don’t require customers to have subscriptions before reporting usage and a single meter can track usage across multiple customers." That sounds very promising and less confusing for our users.
https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/usage-based-legacy/migration-guide
I think this is stripe fixing the huge shortcomings in usage based billing that confuse our users. Right now we have to create a subscription and then they get billed $0/month... unless they have usage, in which case they are billed for the usage. The new meters api starts by saying "Unlike usage records, billing meters don’t require customers to have subscriptions before reporting usage and a single meter can track usage across multiple customers." That sounds very promising and less confusing for our users.