Subscription, usage or a share? Revenue models for platforms

Key takeaways

• There are six common revenue models for platforms: subscription, usage-based billing, commission, freemium, one-time purchase and affiliate. They combine well with each other.
• Three questions point to the right model: How much value lies in a single use, how often do your customers come back, and which side of the platform pays?
• Every model comes with its own technology: subscriptions need plans and a process for failed payments, usage-based pricing needs reliable metering, and commissions need every payment to be split.

As of August 2026

Your platform is taking shape: providers list their services, customers book and pay. What is still open is how the platform itself earns money, with a monthly fee from providers, with a share of every booking or with both. The answer shapes your revenue and what needs to be built. This guide explains the common revenue models, their strengths and the technology behind them.

Subscription: predictable revenue month after month

With a subscription, customers pay a fixed amount on a regular basis, monthly or yearly, and use your offer in return. This creates predictable revenue and works especially well for software that is used regularly. Among the pricing models in its documentation, the payment provider Stripe names two forms of this: tiers at a flat rate, such as Basic, Starter and Enterprise, and per-user pricing (per-seat), where each license stands for one person.

Technically, according to its documentation, Stripe automatically generates the invoices for a subscription, attempts to collect payment and manages the status throughout. Your platform responds via webhooks, meaning automatic messages from Stripe to your server. It unlocks features as soon as a subscription is active and informs customers when a payment fails and Stripe retries it.

With Stripe's entitlements (access rights), you assign each tier its features, and Stripe tells your platform when to grant or revoke access. If a customer switches tiers in the middle of the month, Stripe charges the difference proportionally (proration): someone who switches from 10 to 20 US dollars halfway through the month pays an additional 5 US dollars. A ready-made customer portal lets customers update their payment method, switch plans, cancel and download invoices.

Usage-based: customers pay for what they use

With usage-based billing, the price depends on actual consumption, for example on requests, minutes or messages sent. Stripe describes it as a common pricing model for software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses and names three forms: pure pay as you go, a fixed fee with a surcharge for overage, and prepaid credit that is gradually used up. The strength: customers start small, and your revenue grows with their usage.

Tiered pricing can be calculated in two ways. With volume pricing, all units are charged at the price of the tier reached; with graduated pricing, each tier keeps its own price. In Stripe's example with 7 US dollars for the first five units and 6.50 US dollars for the sixth to the tenth, six units therefore cost 39 US dollars with volume pricing and 41.50 US dollars with graduated pricing.

Metering is at the heart of it. Every use is recorded completely and assigned to the right customer. In the basic variant, your platform sends meter events to Stripe, which are added up at the end of the billing period. For new integrations, Stripe now recommends Metronome, a specialist in usage-based billing whose acquisition Stripe completed on January 14, 2026, and which shows consumption in real time.

Important for marketplaces: according to Stripe's comparison table, only the basic variant works with Stripe Connect, Metronome does not. To help your customers keep an eye on their costs, Stripe offers alerts when usage limits are exceeded and invoices as soon as a set amount is reached.

Commission: the platform earns on every transaction

On marketplaces, a share of every transaction is a natural fit: the commission. The platform earns exactly when its providers earn, and providers can join without fixed costs.

Technically, every payment is split for this. With Stripe Connect, the platform sets a platform fee (application fee) per payment. In the example from the Stripe documentation, a customer pays 10 US dollars, of which 8.77 US dollars go to the provider and 1.23 US dollars to the platform. With destination charges, the platform bears the Stripe fees of 0.59 US dollars, so it keeps 0.64 US dollars.

It therefore pays to factor the payment fees into the level of the commission from the start. For subscriptions between customers and providers, Stripe keeps a set percentage of the invoice for the platform once per billing period.

Freemium and free trials: try first, pay later

With freemium, a basic version is free for good, and advanced features cost money. A free trial, by contrast, opens up the full offer for a limited time. Both make getting started easy, because customers experience the benefit before they pay.

Technically, it is all about limits and unlocking features. With Stripe, a trial can start without a stored payment method, and three days before it ends, a webhook announces the end so that your platform can inform customers in good time. A free plan can be run as a subscription with a price of zero, and when a paid price is added, the billing period restarts immediately by default.

One-time purchase and pay-per-view: paying per item

With a one-time purchase, customers pay once for a product, an access pass or a single piece of content. Pay-per-view is the variant for media: a video or a livestream is unlocked for a one-time payment. The model fits when the value lies in the individual piece of content and customers buy irregularly.

Technically, everything revolves around unlocking. Stripe recommends triggering the unlock via webhooks and not only via the confirmation page, because customers do not always reach it, for example when their internet connection drops after paying. Because the same payment can be reported more than once, a good implementation unlocks each purchase exactly once.

Affiliate: commission from the merchant

With the affiliate model, your platform recommends products from other providers. If a purchase is made through your link, the merchant pays a commission. This way, the platform earns money without charging its users a fee, which suits offers that help people find and compare.

Technically, this requires an up-to-date product catalog from affiliate program data feeds and links that attribute each purchase. Google considers using affiliate links to monetize a website fine in general and asks that they be marked with the rel="sponsored" attribute, whether they were created manually or automatically. According to Google, good affiliate sites add value, for example with price information, original reviews and product comparisons.

Combinations: several revenue streams, one system

Revenue models combine well. Stripe describes gym management software in its documentation: the gyms pay a monthly subscription for the software, and through the same platform their members pay for individual classes directly to the gym.

In our projects, it has proven useful to set up billing from the start so that it is open to further models, with a shared customer account for all purchases and a clear assignment of every payment.

How to find the right model

Three questions help with the choice:

• Value per use: If a single transaction carries a lot of value, such as a booking or a sale, a share of it fits. If the value comes from ongoing use, a subscription fits.
• Frequency: Regular use points to a subscription. If usage varies widely from customer to customer, usage-based billing reflects that fairly. Infrequent purchases suit a one-time purchase.
• Who pays: On two-sided platforms, it is not only about the level of prices but also about how they are split between the two sides.

On the last question, the economists Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole described in 2003 that platforms must get both sides of the market on board and often treat one side as a profit center and the other as a loss leader. Their example: video game consoles made money on game developers through royalties per game and treated gamers as a loss leader. PC operating systems took the opposite approach and made money on users.

In practice

Three platforms from our work show how different revenue models can look. For the creator platform ASMRStars, we built five ways to monetize: direct video sales, gifts from fans, real-time tips, subscriptions and pay-per-view. Each creator decided for themselves how they wanted to earn and put together their own model.

byclaw.io, our own product, relies on the affiliate model. The catalog updates daily from affiliate feeds, a hallucination guard only lets real, linkable products through, and every recommendation leads to the shop via a direct link. For Wasserplasma Experience, we developed a platform with a revenue share: each partner studio has its own prices and terms, and tariffs and contracts with e-signature are managed in the back office.

Frequently asked questions

Which revenue model is best for getting started?
Start with the model that fits your core workflow and add others once the platform is in use. You can get a free estimate for your project with our AI project estimator.

Can the revenue model be changed later?
Yes. Stripe states that the purpose of its entitlements (access rights) is to launch, change and experiment with pricing without changing the platform's code. If the features of a plan change, Stripe applies this to existing subscriptions at the start of the next billing period.

What does the billing technology cost?
Without a contract commitment (pay-as-you-go), Stripe Billing charges 0.7% of the revenue billed through Billing, and Stripe lists the fees for the payments themselves separately. A platform's other running costs are covered in our guide What does your own platform cost?

Conclusion

Subscription, usage, commission, freemium, one-time purchase and affiliate each have their own strengths, and they can be combined. The right model follows from the value per use, the frequency and the question of which side pays. With well-designed billing, your platform grows along with your business model.

Which revenue model fits your platform?

Describe your idea in our AI project estimator. You will receive a free estimate by email, and we will get back to you within 24 hours.

Learn more about our services for platforms and marketplaces and SaaS products. Or simply write to us at our email address.

Sources

1. Stripe Docs: "Recurring pricing models". https://docs.stripe.com/products-prices/pricing-models
2. Stripe Docs: "How subscriptions work". https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/overview
3. Stripe Docs: "Entitlements". https://docs.stripe.com/billing/entitlements
4. Stripe Docs: "Prorations". https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/prorations
5. Stripe Docs: "Provide a customer portal to your customers". https://docs.stripe.com/customer-management
6. Stripe Docs: "Basic usage-based billing". https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/usage-based
7. Stripe Docs: "Set up tiered pricing". https://docs.stripe.com/subscriptions/pricing-models/tiered-pricing
8. Stripe Docs: "Record usage for billing". https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/usage-based/recording-usage
9. Stripe Docs: "Usage-based billing" (Metronome). https://docs.stripe.com/billing/usage-based
10. Stripe Docs: "Compare basic usage-based billing and Metronome". https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/usage-based/compare-metronome
11. Stripe Newsroom: "Stripe completes Metronome acquisition", January 14, 2026. https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-completes-metronome-acquisition
12. Stripe Docs: "Monitor usage with alerts". https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/usage-based/monitor
13. Stripe Docs: "Create destination charges". https://docs.stripe.com/connect/destination-charges
14. Stripe Docs: "Create subscriptions with Stripe Billing" (Connect). https://docs.stripe.com/connect/subscriptions
15. Stripe Docs: "Set the subscription billing renewal date". https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/billing-cycle
16. Stripe Docs: "Fulfill orders". https://docs.stripe.com/checkout/fulfillment
17. Duy Nguyen (Google): "A reminder on qualifying links and our link spam update", Google Search Central Blog, July 26, 2021. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/07/link-tagging-and-link-spam-update
18. Google Search Central: "Spam policies for Google web search". https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies
19. Jean-Charles Rochet, Jean Tirole: "Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets", Journal of the European Economic Association 1 (4), June 2003, pp. 990 to 1029. https://doi.org/10.1162/154247603322493212
20. Stripe: "Stripe Billing | Preisgestaltung" (Billing pricing, Germany). https://stripe.com/de/billing/pricing