In addition to Usage-based billing or Credits-based billing, Maple can make any persistent model or object in your system billable.

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Objects vs Usage

The core difference is that in Object-based, objects are persistently billed until you say we shouldn’t (object billing) where Usage-based relies on a ticker that counts up and resets after a desired period (month, year etc).

In Object-based Billing, you charge your customers based on the number of custom objects they are assigned or are part of their plan.

  • Example: For project management tools like Asana, Jira, or Clickup, customers are charged per seat or license that a user occupies
  • Example: A company selling a home monitoring system can set up generic objects like “Devices” or more specific objects like “Camera”, “Motion Detector” etc and charge customers based on the number of objects - Beginner Plan with 5 Devices OR 3 Cameras and 2 Motion Detectors

In Usage-based Billing, you charge your customers based on the amount or frequency of the actual usage of a service or resource, such as API calls or Cloud Storage

  • Example: Twilio’s SMS and Voice API where the customer is charged per SMS sent/received, or per minute for phone calls.

If your product pricing aligns more with the usage-based model, go here: Usage-Based Billing

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Object Ingestion

You can leverage the Maple API to sync object-based items to do state based metric calculations. For instance, this would apply to counting the number of seats used by customers in your product or the number of servers or instances spun up by your service on behalf of your customers. Maple manages complete management of proration. tracking and invoicing for these models in your product.

The objects can be synced into Maple through individual CRUD operations or object actions can be sent in bulk through the Ingest Objects API.

curl --request POST \
     --url https://api.maplebilling.com/api/v1/companies/company_id/objects \
     --header 'accept: application/json' \
     --header 'authorization: Bearer my_token' \
     --header 'content-type: application/json' \
     --data '
{
    "customer_id": "cus_2Z8glHJ9VcYQ1pgAjtJhE14Uucv",
    "customer_identifier": "external_customer_id",
    "object_identifier": "external_object_id",
    "item_id": "collaborator_object_id",
    "properties":{
        "is_active": "true",
        "role": "editor",
        "collaborator_email": "[email protected]"
    }
}
'

This billing model is particularly useful for enabling true-ups for your customers at a desired frequency. You can establish a regular sync of these objects from your application with the use of the Objects API.

Maple also supports the same aggregators for object-based billing. You can create complex matching rules to create highly specific billable metrics on objects.