How does PayPal handle granular billing like this?
Simple. Send the customer to PayPal with a subscription request, the amount and customer id. They activate the subscription and pay. Get that id back via IPN after each new subscription. Deliver the service. Done!
How does that match the use case here, with billing per minute? If the user has to confirm each subscription, you can't efficiently create new subscriptions for e.g. each call. You also can't know beforehand how much you'll need to bill. If you're at the end of the month sending a single "here's everything" request, I fail to see how that's different from what's described in the article.
Exactly my point. PayPal also makes it extremely simple for fixed amount monthly subscriptions - which is my use case. I do use Stripe, but not for subscriptions. This is the reason why.
Doesn't appear to have a non-deprecated replacement new users could use though?