Stripe Billing opens up to third-party processors and smarter revenue analytics

Stripe has rolled out a broad set of updates to Stripe Billing, spanning everything from payment processor interoperability to deeper subscription analytics and more flexible usage-based billing tools. The changes were announced at Stripe Tour New York and represent what the company describes as its largest-ever update to the Billing product.

Billing now works with external payment processors

Following Stripe's April announcement of a more modular, interoperable architecture, Billing can now be used with third-party payment processors in certain regions. This addresses demand from large users running complex, multi-processor payment stacks who want Stripe to handle subscription lifecycle management without requiring Stripe to process the underlying transactions.

With this capability, you can create subscriptions that automatically process payments through a third-party processor, manage subscription states, and track payment success for externally processed payments, subject to availability. Integration is available via a private preview for those who want to connect Billing to their own processor.

New analytics tools for subscription data

Previously, subscription health was measured through high-level metrics like active subscribers, MRR, churn rate, and customer lifetime value. While useful, these aggregates didn't allow for deeper segmentation or investigation into the drivers behind revenue changes. New analytics and reporting features in the Dashboard's Explore functionality address that gap, letting you:

  • Segment data by product and price, and drill down to understand the underlying causes of MRR changes, analyze historical trends, and forecast SaaS performance
  • Run custom queries in Sigma, or use an AI-powered assistant that turns business questions into answers
  • Export revenue data to any data warehouse for consolidation with other business information

In addition, a benchmarking feature pulls insights from the entire Stripe network, allowing you to compare your MRR growth, subscription failure rates, and churn rates against similar businesses on Stripe. The benchmarking page is available directly in the Dashboard.

Expanded usage-based billing capabilities

With more than 80% of SaaS companies interested in usage-based pricing, Stripe has extended its usage-based billing solution with several new options:

  • Credit burndown pricing: Offer customers the ability to prepay for usage. Credit grants can be configured in the Dashboard or via the Meters API.
  • Thresholds and alerts: Notify business teams when a preset usage or spend limit is reached, helping identify trends and upgrade targets. Alerts can be set up on the Billing Alerts page in the Dashboard.
  • Higher throughput: Report usage data at up to 100,000 events per second, reducing delays and billing errors. Access requires contacting sales.
  • 72-hour grace period: Add up to a 72-hour grace period on invoices with automated collections, allowing usage data from third parties to be included in the correct billing cycle. This is configurable on the Invoice settings page in the Dashboard.