This is how music and dance schools charge clients (at least here) - pre-pay based on the number of lessons you will attend this month. What I'm looking for is a way to automate it so we don't need to manually charge everyone's cards individually (and manually) each month.
But WHY? I don't understand what benefit metering your payment provider has.
shrug I don't know how to explain it any better. We want to charge a credit card _before_ the lessons for the month, and the amount will be different each month (either 4 or 5 lessons). Stripe will let us do this _after_ the month (so-called "metered" billing), but not before; they will also do subscriptions but they need to be the same amount for each invoice. So I'm looking for a payment solution that will automatically bill a credit card for a variable amount each month without the client needing to manually enter or approve their payment information each month. It's a subscription where the amount is different each month, and needs to be paid _before_ the service is provided.