Pricing and payments

Each API has its own pricing on the Pricing tab and its own Stripe connection on the Payments tab. You can charge per request, sell monthly plans, or do both. MicroAuth takes no cut of what your customers pay you.

Presets

When you launch an API you pick a starting point. Every value can be changed later.

Preset	Customers without a plan	Plans
Pay as you go	Pay $0.001 per billable request from prepaid credit, with a $1 welcome credit and 10 requests a second	Off
Free with a quota	Free, 10,000 requests a month at 5 requests a second	Off
Monthly plans	Free, 1,000 requests a month at 2 requests a second	Basic at $19 and Pro at $99 a month

Pay as you go

Customers prepay credit, and each billable request is deducted from their balance at your price. When the balance can't cover a request, your API answers 402 until they top up.

Setting	Default	What it does
Price per billable request	$0.001	Charged for each response with a billable status code
Welcome credit	$1.00	Given once to every new customer so they can try your API
Top up amounts	$10, $25, $100	Buttons on the portal's Billing page
Minimum top up	$5	Smallest custom amount a customer can pay
Low balance email	$2.00	Customers are emailed once when their balance drops below it. 0 turns it off
Automatic top ups	Allowed	Customers can save a card that is charged when their balance runs low

With pay as you go off, nobody can buy credit, there is no welcome credit, and customers without a plan use your default limits for free.

Default limits

Requests a second and requests a month apply to every customer without a plan or custom limits. 0 means no limit. The billable status codes, 200 to 206 by default, live here too.

Monthly plans

Plans are subscriptions your customers pick on the portal and pay through Stripe. Each plan has:

• A price a month. 0 makes a free plan that customers can switch to without paying. Changing the price only affects new subscriptions.
• Optional requests a month, requests a second and price per billable request. Blank fields use your defaults. A price of 0 includes every request in the plan.
• Credit each month, added to the balance on every paid invoice. Use it for plans that include a dollar amount of usage.
• Visibility. Public plans are listed on the portal. Private plans are only offered to customers you put on them from their page in the dashboard.

Deleting a plan with subscribers archives it instead: they keep it until they cancel, and nobody new can pick it.

How customers subscribe

• A new subscription goes through Stripe Checkout. The plan starts as soon as Stripe confirms the payment.
• Moving from one paid plan to another changes the subscription in place, and Stripe prorates the difference.
• To cancel, customers open Invoices and cards on the portal's Billing page. They keep the plan until the end of the period they paid for.
• A free plan applies right away. A customer with a paid plan cancels it first.

You can also put a customer on any plan yourself from their page. That plan isn't billed through Stripe, which suits invoices you send yourself.

Stripe

Payments go straight to your own Stripe account through Stripe Connect. A workspace admin clicks Connect Stripe on the Payments tab, signs in to Stripe and approves the connection. That's all the setup there is: no keys to copy and no webhooks to configure.

Once connected:

• Top ups and subscriptions use Stripe Checkout, with your business name on the receipt.
• Your plans are created as products and prices in your Stripe account and kept in sync when you edit them.
• Customers manage cards and invoices in the Stripe billing portal, through Invoices and cards.
• The Payments tab lists recent top ups, plan payments, refunds and disputes.

If Stripe needs more details before you can take payments, the Payments tab says so. Finish the setup in Stripe, then click Refresh. A Test mode badge shows when you connected a Stripe test account.

Refunds and disputes

Handle them in Stripe as usual, and MicroAuth follows:

• A refund of a top up removes that credit from the customer's balance.
• A dispute removes the credit while it is open, and puts it back if you win. Workspace admins get an email when one opens.

A balance can go below zero this way. The customer then gets 402 until they top up again.

Failed payments

• Subscriptions. When a renewal fails, the customer keeps their plan while Stripe retries the card, and MicroAuth emails them to update it. If Stripe finally cancels the subscription, the customer moves back to your default limits and gets an email that the plan ended.
• Automatic top ups. If the saved card is declined, the customer gets an email and MicroAuth tries again a day later. Topping up once with a working card, saved for automatic top ups, fixes it right away.

Without Stripe

Stripe is optional. Free APIs need no payment setup at all. If you bill another way:

• Add or remove credit from the customer's page in the dashboard.
• Call the credits endpoint from your own billing system.
• Put customers on a plan yourself from their page.