Tracking usage -- enterprise customers for RECAP Search Alerts

[s-taube]

User stories:

• As a customer, I want to view my usage for the current month at any given time, so that I know how many resources are still available.
• As a customer, I want notifications when my usage hits certain thresholds, so I can manage my remaining resources.
• As a customer, I want to view my all-time usage by month, so that I can understand my average usage and make resource/budget decisions.

Definition of Done:

• A list of different tracking options
• Pros and cons of each
• Include pricing (if external service)

[mlissner]

This feels like the kind of thing we'll probably build ourselves, but what do I know. Maybe an external tool will handle this for us. Tracking API usage does feel like the kind of service that ought to exist by now. I look forward to what you find.

[s-taube]

I have a call with Stripe on Monday to discuss.

[s-taube]

Radio silence from the salesperson we spoke with last week. He's not an account manager, though. Is it possible to add me as a user on our Stripe account? I wonder if I would have better luck getting in touch with more responsive customer support that way. @mlissner

[mlissner]

Just added you as a sandbox user; you should get an email?

[s-taube]

Got it. Thanks!

[s-taube]

After reviewing Stripe documentation again, and playing around in the sandbox, checking out help forums, I did not discover anything new related to customer views for usage. I ended up emailing stripe customer support. We'll see what they have to say!

[mlissner]

Bummer. Thanks for sticking with it!

[s-taube]

Before I forget -- @mlissner do you have a sense of billing volume? $ per month or year ~ish? A range would be helpful to have, as I'm setting up demos in the new year, and this is the first question Sales asks.

[mlissner]

Hard question. Depending on who signs up for this, it could be a $10,000/year thing or a $1,000,000/year thing.

Helpful?

[s-taube]

Yeah that's kind of what I figured.

[s-taube]

Ok, I checked out a bunch of subscription billing options. I found a few that seem to do all/most of what we want. I plan to reach out the first week of Jan and get some demos set up.

There are a few options that seem to do usage tracking only, and don't do billing or invoicing. So we'd integrate them with Stripe or some other billing service. Are those worth checking out? Or is that what you mentioned you specifically don't want to use?

I don't have the prices for all, but a couple of them start at $599/month for up to $100k billing volume. Just an fyi.

@mlissner

[mlissner]

Wow, that's a bigger thing than I imagined. I think tracking only might be helpful, but without the billing part, it's going to be annoying since we'd have to do invoices and whatever. Although if they have seamless Stripe integration, maybe that's fine?

Pricey!