When a product is listed in the catalog, how subscriptions, billing and payment work, and what pausing and removing do.
A public product is listed in the catalog as soon as Stripe has confirmed your details and your VAT ID has been verified as valid. Until then, your product list shows what it is waiting for. If, three times in a row, your API does not respond to our availability check or responds with an error of 500 or above, we take the product out of the catalog. Once it responds again, the product returns by itself. Existing subscriptions are not affected.
A public product is listed in the catalog and can be subscribed to. A private product is not listed, and new subscriptions are not possible; anyone who has already subscribed can keep calling it. Nobody can call a paused product, not even with an existing subscription, until you resume it. The subscriptions remain in place. Your buyers are not notified; their calls get the response “not found”. Resuming restores the product as it was before, public or private. You choose public or private in the product form under “Visibility”. Pause and Resume are in your product list under “⋯”. Only MeterGate blocks a product; you can then neither edit, pause nor remove it. You will find the reasons and how to object under “Actions and reasons”.
The buyer takes out a subscription with MeterGate. Every call whose response your API delivers and we pass on to the buyer is counted, including responses with a status from 400 to 499. Errors from 500 upwards, timeouts and responses we cannot deliver are not counted. As a rule, we bill after each calendar month: the buyer receives an invoice, and you receive a self-billing invoice for your share. This applies to every product alike, whether public, private or paused, and also to calls from before the product was removed. A new price applies from the next call, including in existing subscriptions. A subscription ends when the buyer cancels it or their account is closed. You cannot end a subscription yourself.
When we bill, the buyer pays directly into your Stripe account, and MeterGate retains its part of the payment. Stripe pays out to your bank account on its own schedule. If a buyer’s calls with you add up to less than €0.50 in a month, we collect the amount together with a later month, at the latest at the end of the fifth following month; anything still below €0.50 including VAT at that point lapses. If a buyer does not pay, you receive nothing for those calls; MeterGate does not advance any money. You set how much a buyer may owe until the next billing with the credit limit under “Advanced options”. Once it is reached, we decline the buyer’s further calls until the next billing. A changed credit limit applies to new subscriptions; existing ones keep the credit limit they were taken out with.
You can only remove a product once no subscription is running. As long as a buyer is subscribed, their contract for this product continues. Until then, you can pause it: then nobody can call it, and nothing more is incurred. A suspended subscription also counts as running, for example after a buyer’s payment failed; it becomes active again once the reason is resolved. Removing cannot be undone. The product disappears from the catalog, can no longer be called, and the key for your API is deleted. Your product list then shows it under “Removed products”. Its address stays reserved so that no other product receives calls meant for yours. A product cannot be deleted, because calls, billing records and accounting documents are linked to it and we keep them for the statutory period.