---
title: Usage based metered billing with Ruby on Rails and Stripe
slug: usage-based-metered-billing-with-ruby-on-rails-and-stripe
published_at: 2022-08-09 18:00:33 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:22 +0000
summary: 
description: In this video, you'll learn how to use Stripe Checkout to start a Subscription that includes a flat monthly rate plus a small fee based on usage. We'll also look at how to create UsageRecords with the Stripe API to report usage over time.   00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:16 Create the pricing page with Tailwind UI 00:06:50 Create the Checkout Session and redirect 00:11:55 Install the Stripe gem 00:13:07 Redirect back after authenticating with devise 00:16:55 Create and store a Stripe Customer on the current user 00:21:46 Store Subscription data in the db 00:24:20 Handle Stripe webhook events 00:34:53 Handle customer.subscription.created event 00:51:13 Report UsageRecords for the metered Subscription 01:01:51 Create a metered Stripe price with divide by transform 01:11:52 Conclusion  #rails #rubyonrails #webhook
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, stripe, stripe billing, stripe usage based billing, metered billing, metered, stripe metered billing, Setting up Metered usage based billing in a Ruby on Rails application, ruby on rails, rails tails and trails, web development tutorial, ruby on rails 7, stripe subscription payments]
views: 6188
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/usage-based-metered-billing-with-ruby-on-rails-and-stripe
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8cN4pEofy8
youtube_id: v8cN4pEofy8
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/v8cN4pEofy8
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/v8cN4pEofy8/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Usage based metered billing with Ruby on Rails and Stripe

*Published: August 09, 2022*
*Views: 6188*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8cN4pEofy8)

[![Usage based metered billing with Ruby on Rails and Stripe](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/v8cN4pEofy8/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8cN4pEofy8)

## Description

In this video, you'll learn how to use Stripe Checkout to start a Subscription that includes a flat monthly rate plus a small fee based on usage. We'll also look at how to create UsageRecords with the Stripe API to report usage over time.


00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:16 Create the pricing page with Tailwind UI
00:06:50 Create the Checkout Session and redirect
00:11:55 Install the Stripe gem
00:13:07 Redirect back after authenticating with devise
00:16:55 Create and store a Stripe Customer on the current user
00:21:46 Store Subscription data in the db
00:24:20 Handle Stripe webhook events
00:34:53 Handle customer.subscription.created event
00:51:13 Report UsageRecords for the metered Subscription
01:01:51 Create a metered Stripe price with divide by transform
01:11:52 Conclusion

#rails #rubyonrails #webhook

## Transcript

hey what's up welcome back in this episode you're going to learn all about usage-based or metered billing uh we're working on building out an application for helping people promote their youtube videos and when they want to automatically generate a suggestion using open ai under the hood what we want to do is collect payment for their suggestions so in the case of openai you have to pay based on like the number of tokens that are being passed around and so what we want to do is sort of match our pricing model to the value that we're adding and so what i want to do is collect a subscription fee for my service and then also charge a an amount on top of that that will be for the tokens that people are using or generating so that someone doesn't come in here use a bunch of the api and rack up my bill um so we're going to build out this usage or meter-based billing so at this point right now we've got a very simple rails application it's got authentication with devise you can log in sign up whatever we've got other videos on this channel if you're not if you haven't seen them before go check out some of the authentication videos but in this episode we're going to set up our payment system so the first thing we want to do is add a pricing button here that's going to show a pricing page all right so on this pricing page people will be able to say sign up and if they say sign up that will redirect them through the signup flow so that we can create a stripe customer and then it'll ultimately redirect them out to stripe checkout where we will sign up for a subscription that's going to have some flat amount each month plus it'll tell them how much it's going to cost per token so i'm thinking i don't know some twenty dollars a month plus seven cents per token um or seven cents per thousand tokens that's kind of like if we look at open ai the pricing on here for um for each of these models the price is a little bit different so um this was the one that i was kind of matching it on which is six cents per thousand tokens so we'll do something similar where it's based on the number of tokens so maybe it's seven cents per thousand tokens plus twenty dollars a month and the way that we're going to set this up is uh we need to all right so let's just jump into some code so rails g controller pricings we need a pricing controller it's going to have a show page that's where we're actually going to show like the pricing page so we'll just create that there and pricing show on the pricing page here what i'm going to do is actually use tailwind ui and grab their pricing component because yeah these pricing pages oh wow i think this might actually be new it's got the whole pricing page not just a component um okay we just need um wow these are really nice okay for in our use case we're just gonna have a single okay yeah so we're gonna have some something similar to this where it's gonna be a split panel this split one which i kind of like because here we could say something like 20 a month plus seven cents per thousand tokens or something and this gives us a lot of the same content so i'm just going to copy all of that html and drop that in here wow that's a lot of html uh all right so i've already got some of these plugins installed this is really just going to get us sort of started so let's jump over to our routes and add in um let's see we're going to say resource pricing and now if we come back over here we should be able to go to slash pricing and let's see okay so we don't have that okay so okay so i think what we want to do is have our pricing controller we have a couple different layouts here so let's say um we want the pricing page to use the marketing layout i think and we don't want this top bar so we're going to start okay so let's start ripping out some of these pieces here so we're going to go to pricing show and i don't want okay so i know i don't want this header probably don't want this we don't need any of the navigation stuff so i think um i think we can just remove this entire div and let's see where we end up okay so take control of your team um this is going to be something like take control of your promo i don't know your promotion or something and uh we've already got a footer so we don't need double footers here um so i'm just gonna grab the footer and delete all of that okay we have this call to action section at the bottom boost your productivity sign up so this is all just like get started get started get started stuff um so start building for free and okay so we'll have to go through and update all the copy but basically we want this get started today button and this sign up for free button to both go to the checkout page basically and so what we're going to do here is uh let's update some of the copy let's see this mobile menu i don't think we actually are going to have a mobile menu yeah so we can remove the mobile menu all right that was all hidden and okay all right so take control of your pricing um start okay so i don't actually know if it's gonna have a free plan or not but let's just find this setup fee thing so um this instead of calling this the setup fee we're going to call this like per month and we'll we'll just say it's 20 per month and then here we're going to say 0.07 per thousand tokens and we'll have to we'll have to explain what that means like so 20 a month plus uh seven cents a token and now when we click on this get started today button that's down at the bottom let's get yeah get started today this should be a link that brings us to checkout alright so at this point um because again we only have like one level one pricing level we should be able to just redirect to checkout and have this work um so and then try workflow lite for free that's i'm just going to remove that link so when we say get started today that redirects us to checkout we'll just generate a new controller called checkouts and this will just be the show route for checkouts is going to create the checkout session and redirect us to stripe checkout um so we'll jump in here and this is going to say session is or yeah check out session is stripe check out session.create the mode is subscription the success url we want them to come back to the dashboard and the cancel url should come back to the pricing page or the maybe the root url and then let's see we're going to have some line items and there's going to be two line items one of them the first one is going to be the the price for the recurring amount that's going to happen every month that's the flat amount and the second one is going to be the usage uh price okay so this is gonna be our like um like flat rate per month and then this is our usage based price of like 0.07 per 1k tokens all right so and then after this we can say redirect to checkout session.url um yeah see other but we need to allow other host true and all right so we've got this we also want to have a a user i'm sorry a stripe customer we want to have a stripe customer and so in order to have a striped customer i want to create the customer when someone first signs up and then just always have a stripe customer so if what we could do is here we could check to see one option would be to like if the user is logged in then use their stripe customer id otherwise just pass without the customer and stripe will create a customer object for us um but i'm not sure yeah like i think we want to just force people to be signed up before we redirect them there's a couple reasons for that number one then we can email them and try to like enter them into a drip campaign we can promote to them later number two um then everyone will get a stripe customer id the same way every time so i think what i'm going to do is actually say before action authenticate user so that people have to be logged in before they can see this route and so let's say someone clicks on that sign up button they try to go to checkout that's going to fail and redirect them to sign up and then after they sign up they should be redirected back to checkout which should take them through the payment flow hopefully fingers crossed and then end up um yeah okay so let's go to the dashboard i've got to do in test mode i've got promo tokens here i've got a price for promo tokens right now i said per unit per month but it's actually like per thousand units per month but whatever so i'll just copy this and then this is going to be our usage based price so um yeah this is going to be um the amount that we want to charge there and then the flat rate per month is going to be some other thing where we might have a promo let's just create a new product that's going to be like promo subscription or something and we will create this as standard pricing twenty dollars recurring monthly if you were going to create the usage based price you click on this usage is metered thing the type i picked was sum the usage values at the end of the period and i'll talk about the why in just a little bit so we're going to save the product and copy this id here this is all just test mode when we go to when i go to live mode i'm going to go through the entire stripe atlas process to like sign up for a brand new account and create an entity and whatever but right now i'm just kind of like hacking out the idea and so okay so we've got our prices we have some mode success cancel etc now what i want to do is just see if this thing is going to work no yeah so hmm okay so routes we need to add resource checkout okay refresh okay so this did redirect me back to user sign in so i can't remember what i signed up with okay uninitialize constant stripe okay so we need to install stripe bundle add stripe and then what i'm gonna do is i need to open up my um my credentials file and set my api keys so i'm gonna go to the dashboard again and go to um developers api keys i dropped in my stripe secret key now i'm going to open up config initializers stripe.rb and say stripe.api key is rails.application.credentials.stripe and i think i just called it secret and now if we restart the server all right so now what's happening is after we went to the checkout we were logged in so i want to log out and then go back to this checkout route and you'll notice that we're redirected back to the sign in but if we sign in rather than being redirected back to slash checkout we're just being redirected back to the root i know this is kind of nasty i've got like an alert in the application html but what we want to do instead is we need to persist where the user was and there's a couple different stack overflow posts about this one of them is here and it talks about how we want to store the location in the application controller so in application controller here what we're going to do is write a couple different methods so we can actually just grab these and talk about them so there's two methods here that we will need in order to store the user's location the first is the actual method to store the location this is going to act as a before filter on most methods so in fact like we want to say something like before action store user location bang and this is going to store the location for the user using the full path of the request now if the request is a get request then we don't want it to be stored because this is not an item potent request according to the stack overflow post but the one this is like the one that i care about is slash checkout so i'm actually going to remove that and just call that fine for now the other ones that we don't want to include is any device controllers because you might end up in an infinite loop or any ajax requests because you might have weird behavior now this storable location method becomes in handy when you are filtering out the before action so we're going to say we only want to execute that before action if it's a storable location so we're going to say if storable location and now i believe we should have this location for the user now the last piece is that we need to override this method after sign in path for resource or scope and so we can just grab this and drop it in the application controller head back over here refresh the page and this storable that should have been storable location all right refresh the page okay so now let's log out and let's go to slash checkout okay now we're asked to sign back in okay so what's happening let's look at the request logs redirected to here so we are being redirected to checkout but it's not working because of hmm it's not working because of turbo i bet so what's happening is if we open up the logs here and we say start your re start your trial that is getting checkout which is redirecting us to stripe checkout but in the preview it's failing to load because we're being redirected using um using using turbo so we need to go to our controller or let's go to our view for devise registrations we'll go to the form and we're going to turn off turbo data turbo is false we're going to go to our user or our session new inside of devise and make this one false also data turbo false so that if we are logging in we're redirected okay and look at that we are redirected and here we see okay now we see this is the amount that we're subscribing for and then we also see the promo tokens that is going to be 7 cents a token if we click on subscribe we'll be subscribed to this um and because we didn't pass a customer in this is creating a new customer but we want to create the customer when the user first signs up so we're getting closer but let's let's head back out and do a couple more pieces here so the next thing we want to do is we want to store the stripe customer id on the user so say rails g migration add customer id to users customer id i guess we should call it the stripe customer id and that's going to be a string and that should work just fine so open up users controller oops add stripe because okay so here we have the stripe customer id and it's a string okay rails db migrate okay so now um when we first sign up we want to ensure that there is a stripe customer so i'm going to add a new um after commit on create do if or actually just after commit every time we commit we'll just check to make sure we have a stripe customer id so return if stripe customer id is present otherwise we want to create a new stripe customer and this is going to give us stripe customer and we're going to say update with the stripe customer id okay this is good i think yeah that should be good now the other thing that i want to do is when we're creating the customer i'm actually going to make this called params and by default we'll set them to email as email but if rails.n is development then i want to set params um test clock is equal to test or yeah stripe test helpers test clock dot create at frozen time time dot now and i think that should create a test clock for us that we can use to transition through time this is really cool um and we want that to be the id of the test clock okay so hopefully hopefully that works i think it should the way that we can test this out is we can go into the rails console and just find the user and say u is user.last u.touch and that should that will cause it to [Music] uh have a to run the commit callback and that commit callback will execute um but we got some error so it looks like we got this stripe customer id and is that in there so you yeah so now you has a stripe customer id i don't know why we haven't this unexpected return though um oh return if so yeah i guess we don't want to return out of a block maybe we can just say like okay okay so test two at example.com all right welcome you successfully signed up and we don't have any errors back here uh and we should now have this user dot last and that should have a stripe customer id and it does so now what we're going to do is go back to our checkouts controller and inside of the checkout session we're going to pass the customer is current user.stripe customerid we know the current user is here and that they have a strive customer id because they just were forced to go sign up and when they sign up it creates a striped customer for them so now they should be able to redirect so if we were to log out now and go to slash pricing if we click on this button to get started today we're redirected to sign up um or we're redirected to sign in i guess we probably want to redirect them to sign up maybe or maybe this is clear enough start your free trial and then we can say okay test three at example dot com okay we're redirected to stripe checkout they have to go through this whole process notice that their email address is filled in that's because we're using that stripe customer that we just passed along okay okay now when we subscribe there's going to be some events that fire we're not yet handling those but we need to so i'm going to click on subscribe and we'll come back and figure that out in a minute all right and we were redirected back to the dashboard so that's cool we have like a sign up flow now we need to have the actual provisioning flow so we need some other object now okay so now we want to keep track of all the subscriptions for a given customer so we're gonna say um we're gonna generate a new model called a subscription and this is going to have reference to the user and it's gonna have the stripe subscription id it's also going to have the stripe uh maybe we'll just call it the fixed price id and the usage okay so i i when we're working with a subscription that has multiple subscription items like we are in this case we want we might want to keep track of the price so that we know what like level they're at in this case there's only one level we're only going to have this 20 a month but if we in the future wanted to have you know 10 a month and 20 a month and 50 a month and we'll want to know at which of those tiers they're in and so this is why we want to keep track of the price id that's related to the fixed amount that they're paying each month that tells us like what tier they're in second secondarily we also want to keep track of the subscription item which is not the price id the subscription item for the usage because we need the subscription item in order to report usage every time that someone creates a suggestion we're going to be creating these usage records and so i think we're actually going to create we want to keep track of the fixed price id and we want to keep track of the usage let's say usage price id and we're also going to keep track of the usage subscription item id that's a long name but i think it's fine because that is a really critical and important piece of information as part of the subscription we're also going to maintain a status and what else would we want on here i think that's it for now i think that's it for now so we're going to create this new subscription and um let's see let's look at the migration before we migrate just to make sure that everything looks good so the subscription it has to have all of this stuff okay i think um it's really important that we have this the status is okay if it's null to start but okay all right i think this is fine okay so rails db migrate okay so the next piece of the puzzle is that we need to know when these subscriptions are starting and so we need to handle some web hooks so we've already got a web hooks we've already got a web hooks controller here and this is coming in for the youtube web hook events we also need to handle events that are going to now come from stripe and so now we have a situation where our web hooks controller is only really doing things with youtube events but it now needs to also handle notifications from stripe um so the reason i called this one a youtube event is because the body of a youtube event is coming in as xml it's like this atom feed thing and so when we're talking about json we want which is the format that we're going to receive from stripe we want maybe a different event type so i'm going to say rails g model event and this is going to have data that is json and it's also going to have a status it's also going to have a any like errors processing errors text and um i'm hesitant but i am considering storing the event type on the at the top level event but i think we can just parse it out of data um the nice thing is then we'll be able to see it in the list but whatever this is this is fine yeah we also we're also going to want a job to process these so rails g job event uh like handle event okay real let's let's actually take a look at this and make sure it looks good okay it's got the data the status processing errors you know what let's also track the source because i don't know we might have um json events that come from other from other sources also and we'll want to keep that on the event object too so now what we can do is open up routes and go to our web hooks and say we actually want this to be a little bit more fancy so um yeah i we're going to keep the we're going to keep the youtube one the same but we're going to add collection do post for stripe or for colon source and that will give us a dynamic that should give us like a dynamic thing so now if we do like slash web hooks stripe source will be populated with stripe inside of the controller action all right now let's go back into our web hooks controller and say if the params source is stripe then we're going to say event dot create source is params or maybe if it has a source dot present then event.create source is params source data is just the params and then we're going to say eventhandlerjob.perform later for the event and return and we'll just render json of like status okay all right so now we're able to handle json handle json web hook events and then this one is going to be handle um adam notifications from pub sub hubbub i probably should have named this like json event in this atom event or something but whatever and also at the end of the day we probably could have forked based on the source and just held all of the raw data in the request but i think this is this is fine for now okay now what we want to do is we want to fire up the stripe cli and have it forward those events into our local running web hook server so i'm going to open up my proc file so inside my profile every time i start up bin dev i want it to start this stripe cli stripe listen forward to localhost 3000 slash web hooks stripe and that should i think that should work so now i can restart my server with bin dev and we'll notice that whoops what happened here missing the action key on routes definition oh routes okay so this is also going to go to webhooks create okay so look at our output here you'll notice that there's a new process called stripe it's ready and it tells us this is our webhook signing secret we're going to want this if we're going to verify webhook signing the webhook signing requests for now i'm not going to deal with that and we'll just assume that it's up and running so now what happens is we're going to go back through the flow railsdb migrate t.source is source oh it should have been a string create events t dot uh string rails db migrate actually rails db roll back one other thing i want to do is set the status default to zero rails db migrate okay event now we're gonna have this um youtube event we're gonna grab the same sort of status here okay okay so now if we have our rail server running we're going to go to the pricing page actually let's let's open up our uh root or marketing dashboard and let's add a new thing here called pricing if we click on pricing we're brought to this page i don't know we might want to swap out the header there it looks a little bit odd how close the bottom of this line is okay so the next thing we want to do is click on get started we're redirected here now we're going to sign up for a brand new account so we are going to say start your free trial test four at example.com and now we should be redirected to checkout we are okay so now let's look in the server logs and see if we're getting any events in here okay we are event handler job did you mean handle event job i did so in our web hooks so events are already coming in so handle event job that's where we want it to go so now if i say let's sign up with this 4242 card subscribe now we should get events firing into our web hook handler as this finishes processing okay so we've got events coming in it looks like those might actually be getting processed so if we look at the handle event job right now it doesn't actually do anything right so this should be taking in an event and doing something with it but right now it's not actually doing anything it's just kind of like posting posting and filling it in so let's go look in the rails console at our new events that have been populated event.last and we'll see all the data about the event this is really cool so you'll notice too that all of the event statuses here are still pending that's because inside of our background job to handle the event we're gonna update the status from uh from pending to processing and then ultimately process so right when an event comes in here we'll say event.update status is processing then we're going to do a bunch of stuff and then we're going to say rescue event update status is failed i can't remember what the status actually is event error yeah it is error and then the processing errors are e dot message sure okay otherwise we're going to say event update status is processed and then in the middle here we're actually going to say like handle event which depending on the event type etc and the source so then we might say something like case event dot source and when it's stripe handle the stripe event um else like raise unknown event source and then we can say handle stripe event and the stripe event it's uh the nice thing about handling the stripe event or what we're doing here is we're basically building up like sort of a route like this concept of routing the event so we have um we're doing some setup we're going to actually execute the handling of the event we're marking it as processed if anything fails during that whole thing we're going to mark the event as the processing of the event has failed and store those processing errors and then inside of handling the event we're sort of routing it so if you could imagine that if we wanted to handle events from twitter or from github or discord or these other places then we can handle those in a similar way but we would have handle discord event handle github event handle whatever event and now inside of the handle stripe event we're going to say based on the event.data.type if it's checkout.session.compleated or if it's actually we're going to use just customer.subscription.created and for now we're going to handle the subscription created event handle subscription created event so what this is going to do is this will find the user so we're going to find them by the stripe customer id that looks pretty close let's actually pull out the subscription so the payload of this event is going to be a subscription object but it's not actually going to have everything that we need so let's actually look at the data here so event dot how many did we get we got 15 events so what we want to do event.all.map we want to find the one that is customer.subscription.created so eda data type let's print out their types and then let's say event.all.map or i guess dot find event.type is equal to customer.subscription.created so this is super inefficient right like this query here i'm saying event.all that's loading every single event into memory and then i'm using this array method dot find so you would not do this in practice instead you would look up how do you look how do you do a query into the json field this is not something that i'm super familiar with maybe it'll be kind of fun let's do a little detour rails um yeah query json field with rails active record it's just going to be somewhere clause where we can use the json format okay so here we go let's say like event dot where and then we're going to pass in some thing and it's going to look interesting so it's going to be something like event dot where data so data is the property like that's the column and then i guess this is going to this is this how we point at the key okay so maybe we can point in like this point at um this single quoted string do we need double do we need the double arrow here we got the double arrow and then we want to like reach into data object id or no data object inside of the object here it's going to have i don't even know let's see uh so data type so inside of that actually not object just type and that should be equal to um equal to question mark where the question mark is actually customer dot subscription dot created and it failed okay so let's let's find this again and then where is this thing buried okay so it's not inside of is it not inside of data oh it's just at the top level so this should just be um data dash dash type like this oh sweet okay so this is the this is the json query so data pointing at this arrow with the key type and then the question mark says parameterize the thing that's passed on the right side whatever this is uh overkill i just wanted to look at the data and see okay so we got the subscription we get the invoice items those invoice items have a price the price has um yeah this is okay so the price has the price id okay so for this fixed price one we don't need to store the subscription item id we just need to store the price id um so this is going to be where is this this is going to be buried inside of data okay so let's just say that we've we found the event okay so then we're going to say e.data dot data object that gives us the object back and then this is going to have items and inside the items we have a bunch of stuff but what yeah what i was trying to do is determine whether or not we have all the information we need and i think we actually do so the reason i was pausing here was i wasn't sure if we needed to re-retrieve the subscription turns out we don't so what we can do here is say event data object is going to be our subscription and now we can say um in fact if it's a stripe event stripe event dot oh gosh stripe ruby has a method to construct the event from json oh we can just say stripe object oh yeah let's say stripe event dot construct from event data so if it's a stripe event then we should be able to reconstruct the event from the json the nice thing about that is we can use dot notation instead of all these square brackets everywhere um because it yeah it wraps it up for us nicely and now we can say stuff like subscription.customer and that should find the user for us and now what we want to do is check to see if that user subscriptions dot um find by stripe subscription id if that's subscription.id then like if this one if one of these exists then we want to like it's possible that some events come out of order so it's possible that we already have the subscription and if this is the case that we want to return early so we'll say return if sub dot exists otherwise we want to actually create a subscription so we're gonna say user.subscriptions.create and let's see subscription on the subscription model we have belongs to user but on the on the user model we don't have the has many subscriptions uh and a subscription is going to have the status which will be subscription.status it will have the fixed price id which we'll have to figure out how to find that and it will have the stripe subscription id which is going to be that it'll have the usage price id and the usage subscription item id okay so how do we figure those out well we know that our subscriptions are always going to have two subscription items but i don't think the order is guaranteed so we're going to need to look into um what do we want to do we want to look into the the list of subscription items so this is going to be something like we want to find the fixed item and the usage item the fixed item is going to be subscription.items.data dot find yeah and then i something so let's play around with this so subscription data item dot find i where i uh see um okay so item price let's see here's the item and inside the item we have this price and if the price's usage type is licensed that means that we're talking about the fixed price thing so items.find i where i uh price uh recurring usage type is licensed oh items should we have like data i think okay so that should give us back the fixed price one and it does so gosh that's quite a mouthful right all right so this is how we get at it though so we're gonna drop this in here and then we'll take a look at it so this is going to be items.data i dot price.recurring.usage type is licensed okay and then the other one is going to be metered okay so if we change this to metered this gives us the metered price which is the amount is seven cents so that is right okay now what we want to do is okay so we've got our fixed item fixed item and we should be able to just say like um i at price id yeah okay fix item.price.id and then usageitem.price.id and then the usage item we're just going to say usageitem.id that should give us the subscription item id for the usage thing which will allow us to report usage records all right let's call that good and see if it works so we can um we can find that event again so just e e is our event so we know that it's event number nine so let's exit reload and say e is event dot find nine and now we can say handle event job.perform later e and that should kick off processing for that job now if we look up e again if we say like e dot reload that's going to refresh it from the database and now we have this error it says unknown stripe event type didn't handle this event type huh when also now this event should just be like event.data.type or is it just event dot type no i think it's just event.type now reload e is event dot find nine handle event job perform later e dot reload and then look at the status and the status is some giant error did you mean handle subscription created i probably did undefined method handle stripe subscription created handle uh yeah like we could we could name space them all to say handle subscription created is different than handle stripe subscription created but whatever so event event.find9 i guess we want to reload and then run that and then e is or e.reload should give us undefined method exists for nil class okay return if if it's not nil okay undefined method exists but it says processed so something that i noticed is if we update here and set some processing errors then we retry it then if even if it gets updated to process the processing errors are still there so what we can do is we can clear those out here by saying processing errors is empty string and that should be really good okay so reload perform now and now e dot reload should not have any processing errors at the bottom great it does not and it's processed so we should have subscription.count be equal to one subscription.last okay cool it has the fixed price id it has the usage based price id and it has the usage subscription item the status though of this subscription shows incomplete why is it incomplete did we not finish the whole flow okay so let's refetch and see stripe subscription retrieve and what is the status the status is active okay let's just re-retrieve it and use that instead of depending on what we got in the in the payload because it might be incomplete temporarily so here i'm just going to say let's re-retrieve subscription dot retrieve that'll give us like a proper brand new stripe subscription okay let's go through the whole flow so we're going to log out we're going to start a free try or no we want to go through the pricing page click on this button get started today start your free trial test six at example.com okay sorry for file we already write to three accounts now we see advice subscribe okay now we should be handling these webhook event types as they come in okay we've got a bunch of events coming in let's see subscription.last is the second subscription and the status is active and we have all of our information here fantastic okay all right so now we're handling subscription created that's great all right the next thing we're going to do is every time we spend money with the open api or the openai api by creating suggestions or making making calls to the completion api we are going to start reporting usage records for every single one of those so the way this works is inside of this we have this model called a suggestion model and in here right now i have this job called create a completion job create completion job takes in a suggestion and figures out how to create the suggestion maybe it's we're creating a tweet or we're creating a blog post or we're automatically generating a bunch of different stuff so inside of this complete um creation job we have a bunch of stuff that it does but one thing that we get back from the api is some number of completion tokens and so what i want to do is right after we hit the api to generate a suggestion i i want to then kick off another job that reports a usage record to stripe for the number of tokens so we're going to say the total token so here i'm going to say let's let's go make a new job rails g job and this is going to be called like report usage and we'll take a look at it in a second so this is going to take in as an argument the suggestion and this will um create a usage uh record in stripe for the number of tokens used okay so this will be called from that completion like at the end of the completion job here i'm going to call report usage job to perform later and pass in this updated suggestion that will now have the total tokens so this total tokens is how much we need to report the usage for so here we can say something like um let's go to the api ref stripe.com api usage records create so this is what we want to do we want to create a usage record and pass some stuff in so we are going to pass the quantity that's going to be the number of um the number of tokens and the action is going to be set and then we're going to have some timestamp okay so our timestamp is time.now.2i our quantity is going to be suggestion dot total tokens and our subscription usage record or our subscription id is going to be this the subscription like the metered subscription id thing from our subscription usage subscription item id so how do we get this so suggestion dot a youtube video um okay so belongs to a youtube video and a youtube video belongs to a user so a suggestion has one user through youtube video so suggestion.user and then the user has many subscriptions so we're going to say dot subscriptions.last and it's possible that a user ends up having multiple subscriptions for some reason but if they had a subscription in the past and then they made a new one it's most likely that the most recent one they created is the one that's active and not the old one i'm just gonna assume this is how it works we should also probably check does the user have an active subscription before we generate any usage records but for now this is fine so we're going to say subscription is this thing and now we can say subscription dot usage subscription item id and this should create the usage record and this is this is like usage record is what's going to come back what i want to do is actually update the suggestion with reference to the usage record so that i know that every single suggestion is being tied to a report of that usage back to stripe so that i can like do a bunch of reconciliation with the billing so now i'm going to go create rails g migration and add usage record id to suggestions and that's going to be like the stripe usage record i'm being inconsistent but uh let's see create usage okay so this should be the stripe usage record id rails db migrate okay so now we're going to go back into the report usage job and here we will update suggestion.update the stripe usage record id to the usagerecord.id now we should have like we should be able to keep track when people are reporting usage all right let's see if this whole thing will work uh let's go spend some money so we're gonna come back in here i'm gonna log out and we're gonna log back in oh wait i don't know i don't think i have an active do i have an active subscription let's see um shoot okay uh user dot find two that's this one dot subscriptions i don't have any subscriptions okay so i need to go to slash pricing and then click on get started today and i can actually sign in i think and it should use my stripe customer id when i redirect let's see yes okay and then i will enter in all of these details test card okay click subscribe now i have a subscription okay great so now if i go to sources all right i'll comment that out for now and okay all right so we see our stuff so i'm going to look at a video that i want to promote so i'm going to open up this pub sub hubbub one and i'm going to say think of a tweet okay so that generated a new suggestion so then back over here um see i don't have it automatically run right now because i want to prevent it firing off every single time i click that so now what i can do is say suggestion.last.generate and this should fire off the call to open api or open ai to generate a suggestion and it should also go and charge me money oops oops okay yeah so i kicked it off twice suggestion.last okay um and that failed why did that fail um cannot create the usage record with this timestamp because the timestamps cannot be in the future expected a timestamp less than or equal to this what how are those different oh gosh one six five nine seven two three two what okay so can i do if i'm reporting a usage record i think i can report like now right usage record timestamp yeah um so we'll just yeah report usage job and the timestamp will just be not passed quantity and the action is set okay let's try this again so i think i can actually just say um report usage dot pro or actually we want to reload so report usage dot perform later suggestion.last oh boom look at that okay we've got a usage record cool all right so here on the dashboard i went to customers find the customer and then go to their subscription and under their subscription we can see now that we reported the usage for those promo tokens at seven cents a token 328. so it wants to charge 20 to 22.96 but i think we actually just like this isn't 1000 tokens so we'll have to do some sort of math um and i think we can do some sort of transition thing okay so on the price object um what we want to do is we actually want to i think we want to divide the usage by 1000 okay so i am going to create a new price from the api using the stripe cli and let's see how this works okay so we're going to create a new price and the product is going to be this this same product so we're going to use the tokens product recurring interval is month and we want to say recurring i think okay so the usage type the recurring usage type is going to be metered and then we want to have a transform quantity transform quantity divided by equals 1000 and okay so the unit amount is going to be seven cents u.s dollars per month here's the product the usage type is going to be metered we're going to divide by 1000 i think that might be it no oh and then we want to round do we want to round up or round down so let's say we want to round up all right so let's use this as our new price inside of here so checkouts controller so we're going to set this as our price okay so now let's go back through the entire flow so i'm actually going to just go into rails console and say subscription.deuce all okay and then we'll go back over here and go to slash pricing we're still logged in we click on get started today we are redirected to checkout so now here we go okay great okay so now we see seven cents for every thousand um this is fantastic okay this is exactly what we want so now we're going to subscribe again and okay comes back now we should have subscription.com we should have one subscription and we do now if i go to my sources or let's just go straight to videos i view the video i say think of a tweet and then i say suggestion.last okay that doesn't have anything we'll say s dot generate bang s.reload and that's going to take a little while to actually go do its thing okay fantastic and now we have a stripe usage record so that usage record was reported back for the same customer so we'll go back we'll find our customer now we have two subscriptions but this one is just um right we reported 328 tokens and the unit price is 7 cents so i think let's let's just play around with this for a second and say we'll take that last suggestion and we'll say stripe usage record is equal to nil and then we'll we'll res we'll we will let's see report usage record a report usage job.perform later for the suggestion so we'll rerun s.reload and now we have another usage record so we should have two usage records in here and when we add them up it does not equal a thousand yet right all right so we're retrieving the test clock we can tell okay so the frozen time this is what's throwing me off is that we're using test clocks so uh those are not going to work with this pattern because we want to be able to just use time.now that 2i but on our user model we set up this test clock which is actually um making it worse than it needs to be so i'm going to try to delete okay so that should have deleted the test clock but it should have also deleted the customer so now i have to say user dot find two and then u dot stripe customer id is nil u dot save and that should run all right go to pricing come down here get started go through the checkout flow subscribe all right now we're redirected back s is suggestion.last um esta update stripe usage record id to nil all right and then also we need to check and see if this customer that we just this new customer we created okay good it does not have a test clock all right now let's see if we can get this subscription to actually report so s or uh report usage.perform later as our suggestion.last and uh suggestion.last okay we have a new usage record here so let's go look at our subscription view usage okay so we've got some usage there now what we can do is wait a second and then report it again and i think we should now have more right okay good okay cool so now we have 656 but we're still just charging seven cents all right now let's say that we report it um again and again and again and a few seconds later we reported again and now if we come over here let's see fantastic okay so now we have almost 2 000 tokens we're charging 7 cents per thousand tokens so we're going to charge 14 cents so now if we run it one last time now we should see that we're charging 21 cents refresh ah nice now we're charging 21 cents so i think we might actually in in retrospect i might actually want to use round down as part of the transform but going back through and just explaining okay so explaining what happened the test clock using test clocks with metered billing is not something that i had tested before or used before and it turns out that it makes it more challenging to test because your test clock makes it so that when you report usage records those if they use the now um argument those are going to be pinned to the time that the test clock was frozen to so if you're not transitioning your test clock forward every time you're reporting your usage then it's going to have the same time but we want to report it and have it pinned to a specific time which right now we're able to do and confirm that this works and shows all of our different usages so now if i was to actually like go through here and say okay i want to go to my videos and i want to generate a new tweet that is related to this video and then if i say suggestion dot last that will give me the suggestion that i just created and i can say suggestion.last.generate and obviously like in practice eventually i want this to show oh also this is using turbo streams which is pretty cool so i don't have to like refresh the page or anything um but yeah web hooks from the youtube api are called pub sub hubs uh hubbub or the new name for this is web sub here's a tutorial how to set it up boom link out to the um link out to the youtube video that was about this but now we should be able to go over here and see that our usage has increased so if we refresh this it was 22.96 and now it is 20 29 32. cool so if we again if we again come over here and if we were to say okay think of a youtube description and then we generate that last uh thing then in our youtube descriptions we should have well we'll have one more youtube description but that's going to push us over the limit here into our next thousand so now it should be charging us 28 cents if we refresh come back down here and now to 28 cents okay great so i think all this works i the other thing that is on my mind is that i kind of want to prevent people from going like i wanted people to be able to like set up thresholds so they don't overspend themselves so i think that'll be something we do in another episode this was a really long one but we covered a ton of stuff about metered billing and i had never actually gone through the process of setting this up in this way obviously i've never done it with test clocks so this was a fun exercise hopefully you enjoyed it and got something out of it thank you so much for sticking around hopefully this was useful and otherwise we'll see you in the next one where i think we're going to talk about yeah how to limit your your top billing yeah thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one [Music] you

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