The Kinde billing model

In the Kinde model, we handle everything except the payment processing part of billing. Kinde integrates with a third-party payment processor (Stripe) for secure payment processing.

This involves a continuous sync between Kinde and Stripe, to ensure that products, prices, subscription information, invoices and payments, are accurate in both systems.

Kinde does not store payment details, such as credit card information. This is exclusively managed by Stripe.

Billing for B2B, B2C and B2B2C

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Kinde supports billing models for B2B, B2C and even B2B2C. Depending which you are setting up, you may need to do a few different tasks. Most of the setup is common, but we will call out tasks that are only relevant to one or the other.

• B2B - customers are companies, organizations, or groups.
• B2C - customers are individual users.
• B2B2C - the platform model, where you have a customer who is an organization, and then users who are customers of that organization.

Kinde and Stripe

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Kinde integrates a single payment processor (only Stripe Billing for now) to handle the financial and payment management side of things.

Stripe uses the plan data and the customer info to create an agreement in Stripe. The customer is invoiced based on this agreement. Stripe securely stores your customer’s payment details and Kinde never sees credit card or other bank information.

Here’s what the billing feature looks like as a workflow.

Stripe is currently the only payment provider supported with Kinde. But we plan to expand to other providers in the near future.

Multi-currency support

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Kinde has customers everywhere and almost every global currency is supported.

Transaction data and Stripe region

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• When you connect your Stripe account to Kinde, you connect to our Stripe US account. We do this because Stripe US more widely supports global functionality.
• Regardless of your own Stripe account region, you can still select any currency for your plans in Kinde, and Stripe will do the hard part of exchange rate conversion, tax calculations, etc.
• Any fees you incur in Stripe for international transactions are your sole responsibility.

Billing and invoice cycles

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By default, Kinde uses the following billing behavior. You set each fixed charge’s billing interval when you add the charge to a plan.

• Fixed charges (for example, subscription fees) are billed in advance. Customers pay at the start of each billing period, at the interval you choose. You can also offer annual pricing on one fixed charge per plan, at a custom yearly price.
• Each fixed charge has a billing cycle of daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, based on the customer’s original sign-up date.
• A single plan can have multiple fixed charges with different intervals. For example, a monthly fee of $10 and a weekly fee of $3 ($10 / month + $3 / week). Each charge renews on its own schedule.
• Metered (usage-based) charges are billed in arrears. Usage is tracked throughout the billing period and appears on the next invoice.

Next invoice in the portal and admin

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On plan details in the self-serve portal (and on the admin organization or user billing subscription card), Next invoice shows:

• A bare amount and due date
• Licensed fixed charges that renew on that next charge date
• Plus metered usage cost recorded so far in the current billing cycle

If the agreement includes metered features, Kinde shows the caption May change with usage before the invoice is issued.

For mixed annual + monthly plans, the next invoice is often only the sooner charge (for example the monthly item a month later) — not a monthly-normalized average of the whole plan.

Fixed charges on the subscription are listed with their own intervals (for example $100 AUD / year and $3 AUD / month). Recurring feature rates show the interval after the unit label (for example $5 AUD per unit / month); usage totals so far do not include an interval.

You can also set policies to control what happens when a customer cancels or changes their plan.