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Postpaid Billing
Overview
Postpaid billing charges users based on their actual resource consumption after they use the services. With this billing model, users pay only for what they consume, typically on an hourly or monthly basis.
Regardless of the billing system you choose, you need to set prices for the services you provide. This document explains how postpaid billing in SolusVM uses tokens to create flexible pricing that works across different currencies, regions, and tax structures.
How Postpaid Billing Works
In SolusVM, postpaid billing follows this process:
- Users consume resources (such as compute power, storage, or network bandwidth).
- SolusVM tracks usage and calculates costs in tokens.
- Your billing system converts tokens into actual prices based on the user’s currency, location, and applicable discounts or taxes.
- At the end of the billing cycle, your billing system generates invoices based on the consumed resources.
Tokens
Setting an exact price for a feature (for example, $5) is not flexible and cannot account for the following:
- Multiple countries and multiple currencies.
- Different taxation rules across countries.
- Different costs and, as a result, prices in different regions.
- Customers’ discounts.
SolusVM does not store the price-related information mentioned above. It delegates this task to the billing system. Therefore, every paid feature in SolusVM uses a virtual unit called a token instead of a real price. The token is a virtual unit of measurement. The billing system converts the token into a price after it sends the required price-related information. When SolusVM needs to display a price to a customer, SolusVM sends an API request to the billing system’s API endpoint. The billing system then returns the currency, the currency symbol, and the price in that currency.
Benefits of Token-Based Pricing
Using tokens for pricing provides several advantages:
- Flexibility — Support multiple currencies without reconfiguring SolusVM.
- Regional pricing — Set different token-to-currency conversion rates for different regions.
- Tax compliance — Your billing system applies region-specific taxes automatically.
- Discount management — Apply customer-specific discounts through your billing system.
- Centralized control — Update pricing in your billing system without changing SolusVM configuration.
Next Steps
To set up postpaid billing:
- If you use WHMCS, see WHMCS Integration.
- For other billing systems, see Custom Billing Integration.