Billing

Managing billing

This handbook section is sort of the operation manual for the billing engine. If you're looking for the technical details or need to troubleshoot something check out the relevant tech docs

Self-hosted

For information before this stage, please refer to the Sales section of the handbook.

Setting up a subscription

You can send customers to https://license.posthog.com and they can self-serve a license.

You can create bespoke pricing with the following steps:

1. Go to https://dashboard.stripe.com/products and click 'Add product'
2. Alternatively you can add a new price to an existing product
3. If you want the user to get enterprise features, you need to click Add metadata with key plan and value enterprise
4. Give it a name (likely the name of the customer) and description. The customer will see this name!
5. Pricing model select "Graduated model"
   1. The first tier is likely a flat fee, all the other tiers are likely unit based prices
6. Select "Usage is metered"
7. "Charge for metered usage by" should be set to Sum of usage values during period
8. Save product, and copy the API ID under "Pricing" (starts with price_)
9. Send customer to https://license.posthog.com/?price_id=price_...

Activate subscription

As a customer, to redeem a license key:

1. Go to the license page in your PostHog instance. <your url>/instance/licenses.
2. Enter the received license key in the input.
3. Tap on activate license key and you are good to go.

One customer with multiple licenses

If a customer wants to have multiple licenses for multiple environments, but be billed from the same account:

1. Get the user to sign up for a license key as per normal.
2. Manually go to https://license.posthog.com/admin/, find the license key. Keep this tab open.
3. In another tab, create a new license key. You can use the same client name, but you'll need to use a different email. Just add +one to the email, so test+one@posthog.com. Copy across the Stripe customer id, Stripe price id, Stripe subscription id and Stripe subscription item id. Also tick Billing ready.
4. Add a note linking back to the original license + an explanation.
5. Click save and send the new key to the user. Repeat for how many license keys they need.

Yearly invoice

1. (if user already created a license) Cancel their subscription in Stripe
2. Manually create an invoice on the customer with the correct price. Either charge them using the method on file or send them an invoice with a payment link
3. Once the invoice is created, add the following fields to the "metadata" section on the invoice: amortize-until, with the value being the month until which to amortize, ie 2023-03amortized-dollar-amount, with the MRR we should account for with this invoice. Probably the total amount of the invoice divided by 12.
4. (if we have agreed an overage rate with them) Set up a Price and Subscription to track and bill for the overage at the end of the contract:
   1. Create a new Price against the relevant Stripe Product:
      • Usage type - Metered usage
      • Aggregation mode - Sum across all usage records during period
      • Currency - USD
      • Interval - Yearly
      • Pricing - Graduated Pricing
      • For the first tier set the upper limit as your contract event amount, with a flat fee of $0
      • For the second tier set the overage price you have agreed
      • Name - Customer Name annual contract overage YYYYMMDD
   2. Create a Subscription for the Customer using the above price
5. (if user hasn't created a license yet) Manually create a license in https://license.posthog.com/admin/. You should link the stripe customer id, but you can leave everything else blank. Make sure you tick Billing ready.

Cloud billing

Cloud billing may be set up using self-serve. For this, the new user just needs to go to the organization billing page and select one of the available plans (internally please note these plans must have both is_active and self_serve set to True). Billing can also be set up from account creation, by adding the plan_key as a query string parameter (e.g. https://app.posthog.com/signup?plan=standard), this is helpful for redirections from landing sites where a plan has already been selected.

For PostHog Team: to set up a billing agreement, please follow these steps.

1. Go to the Django admin and open the Organization billing objects.
2. Search for the relevant user (either by name, company name, email or Stripe IDs).
3. Once you have the appropriate user, select the plan you want to assign to the organization.
4. In addition to the plan, be sure to check the "Should setup billing" checkbox and click save.

After this the user will be prompted in their app to enter their card details to initiate the billing agreement.

If you need to activate a plan bypassing actual billing on Stripe (this should be extremely rare!), just set up a billing_period_ends that is after today's date (and be sure that "Should setup billing" is not checked).

Non-profit organizations

We offer 50% discount to non-profit companies (see pricing). The activation process is as follows:

1. Non-profit company reaches out to PostHog, likely via email.
2. On our end we validate the company is eligible for the discount.
3. Validate the customer has signed up for the standard plan and completed the billing process. Easiest done in Stripe dashboard, look up the customer using the owner's email address. The Standard Plan subscription must be active and the customer must have a valid payment source on file.
4. On the customer page click on Actions, and then Apply coupon. Select coupon "Non-profit organization discount" (ID: NxipELS0)
5. Let the customer know via email.

Startup & YC plans

We offer a deal for certain YC companies & other startups, while the details of this deal change periodically (and are documented in the main website and/or ops repo), here are the details on how to apply the plan for a company. Internally, these plans have special logic handling in the posthog-cloud repo. If our deal terms changes (current details detailed below), a new plan needs to be added. This custom logic is handled in multi_tenancy/models.py#handle_post_card_validation). Currently we only have one plan (plan_key = startup) which provides free billing for 1 year and a 20M monthly event allocation.

How to apply it

• Follow the steps above (Go to Django admin, find the relevant customer, ...).
• For the plan, you'll choose the custom startup plan, plan_key = startup. Be sure to check the should_setup_billing checkbox!
• Let the customer know they need to enter their card information at the prompt (shown on every page of the app).
• After they enter their card information successfully, the plan will be activated and the prompt will disappear. The plan will last for 365 days from the moment they confirm their card details.

General structure & notes

• The way this plan works internally is that it creates a checkout session with mode = setup and with a card pre-authorization charge instead of a subscription agreement. This way, we validate the card is active and it gets saved on Stripe for future use. When we receive confirmation the charge has been processed and the card saved (via the payment_intent.amount_capturable_updated webhook), we do the custom logic handling to enable the plan for 365 days.
• There's an issue, posthog-cloud#92, with some details on tech debt / improvements to this flow.

Updating subscriptions

This section provides instructions for a PostHog team member to change subscriptions for a existing customer (e.g. if they want to upgrade/downgrade, move from legacy plans to standard plans, etc.)

1. Look up the customer on Stripe dashboard using their email address or Stripe ID (this ID can be obtained from Django Admin too, under OrganizationBilling object).
2. Click on the customer's current subscription.
3. Click on Update subscription.
4. Remove the old item from the pricing table and add the new item.
5. Click on Update subscription. Do not schedule the update for a later time. There will be unintended side effects if the changes are not applied immediately.
6. Find the corresponding OrganizationBilling on Django Admin. You can look up by the same email address.
7. Update the new billing plan and the new Stripe subscription item ID. The subscription item ID starts with si_ (not to be confused with a Subscription ID). This ID will have changed, the Subscription ID remains the same.