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Comment by matthewking | Hacker News Reader

You're right, I've let that go straight over my head.

It's the same deal though at the end of the day, as a business I want to take payments from my customers without hassling them to make manual transfers.

So an id for cc details is the same as bank details from my end providing I can request payments for flexible amounts.

Service providers in the UK seem to be able to change the amount I pay on direct debit agreements without anything further from me, so I assume its all possible on the banking side.

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Looking at the API, if you have the agreement set up you can make charges up to a maximum limit (that you can see) without further customer interaction. If you need to interact with the customer there are different API calls, eg to increase limit, get initial agreement.

Interesting, thanks for pointing that out.

So id have to get the customer to agree to authorise an amount larger than their current subscription fee so that it has scope to cover upgrades and extra services - something doesn't quite feel right there, maybe I'm approaching it completely wrong.

It appears so from this example, where there is a usage based fee

https://gocardless.com/docs/api_guide#pre-authorization

I can't see any guidelines about how you are recommended to approach these types of situation. In some ways pre-setting a max limit is nice for the customer if you warn them when they approach. I know people who have been billed huge amounts on AWS without really realizing. SO long as you hand hold the customer and your pricing model is simple to understand you should be able to make it work out I would think. For upgrades there is probably no reason not to get explicit agreement (presuming it is just a checkbox really, no need to give the acount details again after all), it is variable usage that is more complex I would think.

If we are able to provide some blurb on the form then it can probably be explained adequately to alleviate any of the customers concerns, on the other hand if they just see a form asking for authorisation to take an amount over their standard subscription it probably won't work.

I agree that subscriptions could change if they just have to tick a box and not provide all their details again, it's just that in our case we often provide a small variable number of one off add-on services to each customer over a month which we'd ideally not have to ask them to pay for seperately.

I've signed up for their beta though and sent them an email, hopeful that its workable. If they can do what we need id be a very happy man.

You can pass in information to display on the checkout pages. We can definitely help you with any kind of variable billing. You can come and chat with us at:

https://gocardless.campfirenow.com/3ae88

[edited link]

Thanks, sounding good so far, just need to get an account so I can test it out :)

The campfire channel seems to be non public?

As Alex and Justin mentioned, users can pre-authorise a given amount, optionally over a time interval (e.g. up to £100 each month). The merchant can then bill the user within this limit directly via the API.

According to the API docs, you can get customers to create a Pre-Authorisation, and then raise Bills against this authorisation.

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