Seat Based Billing

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Understanding Seat Based Billing

Seat Based Billing allows you to set a per-seat price for your product and let customers purchase multiple seats. This is particularly useful for team-based products, enterprise software, or any service where pricing scales with the number of users.

Seat Based Billing in Creem works for both One Time Payments and Subscriptions seamlessly without any special setup.

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Key Concepts

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Per-Seat Pricing

In Seat Based Billing:

• Base Price: Set in the Creem dashboard as the price per individual seat
• Units: Represents the number of seats being purchased
• Total Price: Automatically calculated as (Base Price × Units)

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Implementation

To implement Seat Based Billing, you’ll need to:

1. Create a product in your Creem dashboard where the price is the base seat price
2. Generate a checkout session with the desired number of seats
3. Direct your customer to the checkout URL

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Code Example

const seatBasedCheckout = await axios.post(
  `https://api.creem.io/v1/checkouts`,
  {
    product_id: 'prod_your-product-id',
    units: 5, // Number of seats to purchase
  },
  {
    headers: { "x-api-key": `creem_123456789` },
  }
);

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Managing Seat Changes

You can manage seat quantities for your customers in subscriptions by:

• Adding seats: Modify the subscription through the dashboard or update subscription API
• Reducing seats: Modify the subscription through the dashboard or update subscription API

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Update Subscription API

If you wish to add or reduce the amount of seats in a given subscription, you can use the subscription API to make changes. Usually, it is great practice for your system to store the subscription ID of a given customer. With the subscription ID, we can then query Creem API to get all information needed to update a subscription.

1. Querying subscription details
   • With the subscription ID, call the GET Subscription Creem API.
   • Retrieve the Item ID from the subscription item.

const subscriptionDetails = await axios.get(
  `https://api.creem.io/v1/subscriptions?subscription_id=sub_12312312312'`,
  {
    headers: { "x-api-key": `creem_123456789` },
  }
);

{
  "id": "sub_2O4LbygGkNJJ6VrStIZz21",
  "object": "subscription",
  "product": {
    "id": "prod_6PyZn18alhCSGwhJXHBdQ4",
    "name": "This is a product",
    "description": "This is a product",
    "image_url": null,
    "price": 1000,
    "currency": "EUR",
    "billing_type": "recurring",
    "billing_period": "every-month",
    "status": "active",
    "tax_mode": "exclusive",
    "tax_category": "saas",
    "default_success_url": "",
    "created_at": "2025-01-10T06:18:31.583Z",
    "updated_at": "2025-01-10T06:18:31.583Z",
    "mode": "local"
  },
  "customer": {
    "id": "cust_3y4k2CELGsw7n9Eeeiw2hm",
    "object": "customer",
    "email": "alec@creem.io",
    "name": "Alec Erasmus",
    "country": "NL",
    "created_at": "2024-12-09T16:09:20.709Z",
    "updated_at": "2024-12-09T16:09:20.709Z",
    "mode": "local"
  },
  "items": [
    {
      "object": "subscription_item",
      "id": "sitem_3l8jhRR2jWWhIBbJrKLwPT",
      "product_id": "prod_6PyZn18alhCSGwhJXHBdQ4",
      "price_id": "pprice_3WBdYmRIFBgaXRM3Adcdpp",
      "units": 10,
      "created_at": "2025-01-10T08:49:13.790Z",
      "updated_at": "2025-01-10T08:49:13.790Z",
      "mode": "local"
    }
  ],
  "collection_method": "charge_automatically",
  "status": "active",
  "last_transaction_id": "tran_5jcJjZ1xEczUjqYiOjPSyd",
  "last_transaction_date": "2025-01-10T08:49:22.301Z",
  "next_transaction_date": "2025-02-10T08:49:10.000Z",
  "current_period_start_date": "2025-01-10T08:49:10.000Z",
  "current_period_end_date": "2025-02-10T08:49:10.000Z",
  "canceled_at": null,
  "created_at": "2025-01-10T08:49:13.777Z",
  "updated_at": "2025-01-10T08:49:19.991Z",
  "mode": "local"
}

2. Make the subscription change
   • With the Item Id and Subscription ID, call the UPDATE subscription API.
   • Use the units field to the desired amount of seats changed.

const subscriptionDetails = await axios.post(
  `https://api.creem.io/v1/subscriptions/sub_123123`,
  {
    "items": [
      {
        "id": "sitem_123213123",
        "units": 2
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    headers: { "x-api-key": `creem_123456789` },
  }
);

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Manual subscription changes through the Creem Dashboard

You can also modify subscription seats through your Creem Dashboard as a merchant. Simply click on a subscription, and upon the details sheet opening, click on the “Modify Subscription” button

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Billing after subscription updates

The new amount will be charged upon subscription renewal. If you need pro-rata charges or different use cases, contact the Creem team.