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Stripe Billing

The largest installed base in subscription billing, and Tidemill's reference connector implementation.

What it is

A fully managed, cloud-only billing platform inside the broader Stripe payments ecosystem. Its data model centres on Customers, Subscriptions, Invoices and Payment Intents, exposed through REST APIs and an extensive webhook catalogue. Most subscription analytics tools — ChartMogul, Baremetrics, ProfitWell — began life as Stripe data readers.

Key facts
Category Billing layer (managed)
Licence Proprietary SaaS
Deployment Cloud only
Pricing (as of March 2026) 0.7% of billing volume, on- and off-Stripe; invoicing extra
Usage metering Pre-aggregated only — not event-based
Data access API + webhooks
Failed-payment recovery Smart retries, ~41% of failed invoices recovered via ML

Strengths

  • Best API documentation and developer experience in the category
  • Strong webhook infrastructure, well suited to real-time event streaming
  • Payments and billing in one platform
  • Massive integration ecosystem

Limitations

  • Percentage-of-revenue pricing scales poorly for high-volume businesses
  • Usage metering requires pre-aggregation, limiting complex metering
  • No self-hosting — data lives on Stripe's infrastructure
  • Awkward for yearly plans with monthly overages, multi-currency consolidation, and complex proration

Relevance to Tidemill

Stripe is Tidemill's P0 revenue connector and the reference implementation for ingestion mode: webhooks are translated into internal events, published to Kafka, and materialised into analytics-owned PostgreSQL. Every later connector — including Chargebee — was built against the pattern Stripe established. See connectors and events.

Stripe's pre-aggregation constraint is the reason Tidemill computes the usage component of MRR as a trailing 3-month average rather than reading a metering stream: the granular events simply are not available on this source. Lago does not have that limitation, which is part of its analytical appeal. See MRR and Usage-Based Pricing.

Stripe Test Clocks drive the seed data used for local development and metric verification — see testing.

Sources