---
title: Variable amount pricing in Stripe Checkout
slug: variable-amount-pricing-in-stripe-checkout
published_at: 2022-11-11 16:00:02 +0000
updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:51:55 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode, you'll learn two ways to collect variable amount one-time payments with Stripe Checkout. First, you can enable customers to define the price they pay at Checkout for donation or tip use-cases. You'll also learn how to pass a custom amount when creating the Checkout Session, useful in cases where you maintain a large product catalog outside of Stripe or when the amount varies widely from customer to customer.    ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev   ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:33 Demo 01:34 Creating a \"customer chooses price\" in the dashboard 02:58 Letting the user specify a custom amount at checkout 07:25 Conclusion    ### Resources Variable pricing https://stripe.com/docs/products-prices/pricing-models#variable-pricing  Checkout 101 https://stripe.com/docs/videos/checkout-101 Checkout Quickstart https://stripe.com/docs/checkout/quickstart   ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat   ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest  ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88  #stripe #payments #stripecheckout #checkout #donation
tags: [stripe, payments, ecommerce, stripedev, @cjav_dev, Variable amount pricing in Stripe Checkout, Accept variable amounts with Checkout, Different amounts with Stripe Checkout, Collect donations, Collect tips, accept donations with Stripe, Stripe donations, Let customers choose what to pay, customers choose payment amount, variable donation amount, custom payment amounts, custom amount Checkout, ad-hoc amount checkout, cjav_dev]
views: 832
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/variable-amount-pricing-in-stripe-checkout
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-olKBnmC84
youtube_id: 1-olKBnmC84
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/1-olKBnmC84
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1-olKBnmC84/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Variable amount pricing in Stripe Checkout

*Published: November 11, 2022*
*Views: 832*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-olKBnmC84)

[![Variable amount pricing in Stripe Checkout](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1-olKBnmC84/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-olKBnmC84)

## Description

In this episode, you'll learn two ways to collect variable amount one-time payments with Stripe Checkout. First, you can enable customers to define the price they pay at Checkout for donation or tip use-cases. You'll also learn how to pass a custom amount when creating the Checkout Session, useful in cases where you maintain a large product catalog outside of Stripe or when the amount varies widely from customer to customer. 


### Presenter
CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev


### Table of contents
00:00 Introduction
00:33 Demo
01:34 Creating a "customer chooses price" in the dashboard
02:58 Letting the user specify a custom amount at checkout
07:25 Conclusion



### Resources
Variable pricing https://stripe.com/docs/products-prices/pricing-models#variable-pricing 
Checkout 101 https://stripe.com/docs/videos/checkout-101
Checkout Quickstart https://stripe.com/docs/checkout/quickstart


### Support
If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat
 
### Updates
Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest

### Feedback
If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88

#stripe #payments #stripecheckout #checkout #donation

## Transcript

hey what's up welcome back in this episode you're going to learn all about variable amount pricing we're going to talk about how you can pass in your own amounts ad hoc and inline we're also going to talk about how you might enable your customers to specify their own amounts at checkout this is useful for things like tips or donations and it's also useful to create inline prices if you have a big product catalog that's not actually maintained inside of stripe [Music] start off with a simple demo imagine you had a page here to collect donations and you have a button that says donate this is going to make a post request back to our server and then on our server we'll make an API call to stripe to create a checkout session and we're ultimately redirected to this page now at this point we are hard coding a price ID for a donation amount of ten dollars so we can say yeah we want to donate ten dollars and we'll ultimately be redirected back let's take a look at the code for this so if we jump into vs code here you'll see that this is the API call for creating the checkout session this gives us back a checkout session object that we then use to redirect to the session URL in this case inside of our line items we are specifying a price this is the ID of a price if we head over to our stripe dashboard and go to our products tab we can see the product for this donation has a price that has a fixed ten dollar one-time amount we can also create these new kinds of prices so let's add another price here and instead of using standard pricing we can use this new pricing model called customer chooses price when the customer can choose their price we can also set a an amount that is shown by default so perhaps we want to accept ten dollars by default but we also might want to set limits like okay we only want to accept five dollars minimum and maybe we only want to accept at most five hundred dollars so we can add that price and now we have this new price called customer chooses we can copy that price ID head back into our server and paste that in here now we're using this brand new price if we go back through our payment flow restart our demo and click on donate now when we get to the stripe checkout page we'll see that the customer has this new button that allows them to change the amount from ten dollars to maybe one hundred dollars and now they can see that they're going to donate 100 notice that the button said donate that's instead of pay we're able to control that by setting the submit type here to donate instead of the default which is just a pay you can also set it to book there's a couple different options there all right so now we have a successful payment for one hundred dollars and that was something that the customer was able to set now if we wanted to there's also another option here where we could collect the amount on our own form and then pass that in dynamically this is an inline use case we're going to create the price while we're creating the checkout session so let's take a look at our index.html file here we might add a div with an input box of type number we're going to make the step 0.0 because we're using USD today and we're going to set the name to amount and that should be good so now if we head back over to our form we'll notice that there's now an input box for someone to specify the amount they want to pay on the server we want to collect that amount from the request body so we're going to pull the amount off of the request.body and this amount is going to come in as a dollar amount with cents so what we want to do is convert that into a an integer value in cents so we're going to say a const amount to charge is actually parse int of amount times 100 because stripe is going to expect our amount in the smallest denomination possible so this is going to be the sense that we want to actually charge so instead of passing price here what we want to do is we're going to create a price on the fly one option would be to make an API call here and say like I don't know a way stripe.prices dot create and pass in the unit amount as the amount to charge and then take this price this new price that we created and pass its ID down into the price but there's another option and that alternative is instead of passing the price we can pass price underscore data and this will dynamically create a price when the checkout session is created now inside of the stripe API this is one of the patterns is that if you have a property that has an underscore data suffix we have this thing called subordinate object creation that means we're going to create an a new price object on the fly so here we can specify the unit amount as the amount to charge we could also specify the currency as USD and finally we do need to specify the product so in this case we want to pass we could either pass an ID of a product so if we go back to the stripe dashboard here we can grab this ID of the product and pass that in or we can create the product in the fly also so we'll look at that in just a moment so now if we go back over to our page here and we entered in four two four two let's say we want to donate 42.42 cents now when we're redirected our donation is for 42.42 so this is a really common tool if you wanted to accept donations and you you're collecting the amount someone is going to donate on your site before you're redirected it's also a common use case if you are uh looking up your products inside of your database calculating an amount and passing that to stripe but we still had to know the ID of the product here so just like we can pass price underscore data we can also pass product underscore data and all of the attributes that we could pass to create a product are also available here so we can pass in if we wanted a name here um like my donation and then we can pass in a disc a description that's like awesome donation you can also pass images that's an array of URLs publicly accessible images so let's save that and go back to our payment flow one last time if we were now going to pay fifty dollars we want to donate or redirect it back to stripe and now we can see that this product here is now related to the custom product and the custom price that were created on the fly when we were making our checkout sessions and now we see that we are going to make this awesome donation for fifty dollars and we are going to be redirected back to our demo so that's a couple different ways that you can pass in variable amounts this price underscore data and product underscore data approach to creating an ad hoc price on the Fly while you're making the API call is also supported inside of invoicing and subscriptions this is one of the ways that you might manage a large product catalog outside of stripe in practice I would recommend creating those products and prices inside of the stripe dashboard and then passing the price property here instead of price data most of the time unless again you are solving for this donation use case thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one [Music]

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