Skip to main content

​
Overview

The Frontier Billing Service is a comprehensive solution for managing all billing-related operations in your platform. It provides a robust pricing engine that allows you to create and manage various pricing plans and features, onboard customers, and handle all billing transactions seamlessly. The service is designed to be flexible and scalable, accommodating a wide range of billing scenarios. It supports the creation of features and plans based on monthly and yearly pricing, and integrates with Stripe for seamless payment processing.

​
Key Features

​
Billing Accounts

Billing accounts represent the billing relationship between an organization and a customer. They store essential billing information including name, email, address, currency, and payment methods. Each organization can have a billing account automatically created or manually configured.

​
Subscriptions

Subscriptions represent a customer’s commitment to pay for a specific plan on a recurring basis. Support for trial periods, prorations, and automatic renewals make subscription management flexible and powerful.

​
Products and Plans

Products represent individual capabilities or resources that you charge for, while plans are collections of products offered at a specific price. Products can have different behaviors (basic, credits, per_seat) to support various pricing models.

​
Features

Features are individual functionalities that a product offers. They cannot be individually purchased but are offerings of a product itself. When a product is purchased by a customer, they are entitled to all features offered by that product.

​
Entitlement Checks

Restrict functionalities for customers based on their subscriptions and purchased products. Frontier provides entitlement checks to verify a customer’s access to specific features.

​
Virtual Credits

Support pay-as-you-go models with virtual credits. Customers can purchase credits and consume them based on usage, separate from subscription-based access.

​
Checkouts

Checkouts represent the process of a customer agreeing to a subscription or purchasing a product. Integration with Stripe Checkout provides a seamless payment experience.

​
Stripe Integration

Frontier uses Stripe as the default billing engine for payment processing. The integration includes:
  • Customer Management: Automatically sync customer data between Frontier and Stripe
  • Payment Processing: Leverage Stripe Checkout for secure payment collection
  • Subscription Management: Handle recurring billing and prorations through Stripe
  • Webhook Support: Real-time synchronization of billing events
  • Test Mode: Support for Stripe test clocks to simulate billing scenarios

​
Stripe Test Clocks

Stripe allows simulating test clocks to test subscriptions, payments, and invoices. The clock needs to be created from the Stripe dashboard, and the clock ID must be passed as a request header while creating a new billing customer account. 
X-Stripe-Test-Clock: clk_123
Once the clock expires, all of its resources also expire. Only platform users can use this header to test Frontier mechanics.

​
Architecture

​
Data Synchronization

Frontier maintains a background syncer that periodically synchronizes customer and subscription data with Stripe to ensure consistency. This handles:
  • Customer profile updates made directly in Stripe
  • Subscription state changes and cancellations
  • Payment method updates
  • Invoice and payment status changes
The sync frequency is configurable through the refresh_interval configuration parameter.

​
Provider ID Mapping

Each billing entity in Frontier (customers, products, subscriptions) has a corresponding provider_id that maps to the Stripe entity ID. This enables:
  • Bidirectional synchronization between systems
  • Direct Stripe API access when needed
  • Consistent state management

​
API Capabilities

The Billing Service provides comprehensive APIs for:
  • Account Management: Create, update, and delete billing accounts with full address and tax information
  • Subscription Management: Create, update, cancel, and list subscriptions with metadata support
  • Product Management: Create and manage products with configurable pricing models and behaviors
  • Feature Management: Define and manage feature catalogs that compose products
  • Checkout Sessions: Create checkout sessions for subscriptions or one-time purchases
  • Usage Reporting: Report platform usage for metered billing and credit consumption
  • Entitlement Verification: Check user access to specific features based on subscriptions
  • Balance Access: View current credit balance and transaction history
  • Plan Management: Create and manage plans that bundle products at specific pricing

​
Getting Started

1

Enable Billing Service

Configure the billing engine (Stripe) with your API keys and webhook endpoints in the Frontier configuration.
2

Create Products and Features

Define your product catalog, including features and pricing. Products can have different behaviors (basic, credits, per_seat) based on your business model.
3

Create Plans

Bundle products into plans with monthly or yearly pricing intervals. Configure trial periods and starter credits as needed.
4

Onboard Customers

Create billing accounts for organizations and enable them to subscribe to plans or purchase products through checkout sessions.

​
Configuration

Key billing configuration options include:
  • auto_create_with_org: Automatically create billing accounts when organizations are created
  • default_plan: Automatically subscribe new organizations to a default plan
  • default_offline: Create billing accounts without immediate Stripe registration
  • onboard_credits_with_org: Award free credits to new organizations
  • proration_behavior: Control how plan changes are prorated
  • collection_method: Configure automatic charging or invoice sending
See the Customers and Subscriptions sections for detailed configuration options.

​
Next Steps

Products and Plans

Learn how to create products, features, and plans for your pricing model

Subscriptions

Manage recurring subscriptions with trials and prorations

Customers

Set up and manage billing accounts for your organizations

Credits

Implement pay-as-you-go models with virtual credits

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Get started for freeTalk to us