Maple enables purchasing, tracking and consumption of application credits for your customers. This is typically useful for resource-based applications such as AI or SaaS infrastructure products, where post-charging with simple usage-based billing can be a risk due to high costs of providing the service. With credits-based billing, credits can be added to the customer with pricing plans that ensure upfront revenue. Credits can be offered for specific billable items in your product or in the form of monetary credits.

Enabling credits-based pricing in your product typically involves the following steps.

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Set up a billable item to issue credits in your app

Billable items in Maple help track distinct entities for which you would like to track credits for in your application. For example, this could be “API Calls”

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Setting up credits-based pricing

Maple supports the creation of pricing plans that add credits for different billable items for the customer. To get started with creating credits-based pricing, go to Products > Add New Product Pricing

The purchase of any credits-based pricing plan is also flexibly supported even via Payment, Checkout and Contract Links.

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Managing credits for the customer

Credits for a customer can be managed through the Maple web application or through the Credits API. Credits related to different billable items can be added, expired or revoked on an individual grant basis.

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Consuming credits in your application

Maple provides an API for credits consumption Consume Credits. This enables you to deduct credits from a customer for a particular billable item based on actions they perform in your product. For example, if you have email credits in your product, you can deduct an email credit from the customer balance as soon as a successful send is complete.

Maple ensures that consuming credits scales reliably, we keep track of accurate customer credit balances even when consumption is being deducted at a high rate.

A detailed log for consumption of credits is also tracked and can be retrieved through the Find Credit Logs API.

curl --request POST \
     --url https://api.maplebilling.com/api/v1/companies/company_id/credits/consume \
     --header 'authorization: Bearer my_token' \
     --header 'content-type: application/json' \
     --data '
{
    "customer_id": "customer_id",
    "type": "UNITS",
    "item_id": "billable_item_id",
    "units": 5
}
'

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Checking credits balance

The credit balance for the customer can be viewed through the Maple web application or through the API.

The Check Balance API provides a detailed breakdown of credits for each billable item and the standing balance that can be exposed in your application.

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Credit Log

An auditable log of all credits can be viewed through the Maple web application (Reports > Credit Log) or through the API

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Displaying credits to customers

Credit balances and credit consumption logs for customers can be exposed to your customers via the Customer Portal