1. Ledger’s role
Ledger is software that keeps track of plans, credit balances and usage for you, and asks your Stripe account to charge Your Customers.- Ledger isn’t a payment processor or the merchant of record. You are the seller, and Stripe processes the payments. Your Customers pay into your Stripe account under your agreement with Stripe.
- Ledger never holds or moves your funds. It doesn’t start payouts, and it isn’t a bank, money transmitter or escrow agent.
- Your relationship with Your Customers is yours. Ledger isn’t a party to your sales or your terms with Your Customers.
2. Your Stripe account
When you connect a live secret key, you authorize Ledger to use it on your behalf to:- create and update products and prices for your catalog;
- create Checkout Sessions, subscriptions and subscription schedules, and add usage charges to invoices;
- create and manage the webhook endpoint Ledger uses, and read the events, customers, invoices and subscriptions it needs;
- issue a refund only when you ask for one, for example by calling an endpoint with a
refundoption.
3. Activation and live charge controls
Live charges start when you choose Activate live billing and every setup step passes. There’s no review by us. You can turn Live off at any time in Settings › Workspace. We may stop new live charges for all workspaces at once when we need to for safety, such as during an incident. When new charges are stopped, whether by you, by us or by a suspension, Checkouts and upgrades are refused, but existing subscriptions keep renewing in Stripe and balance checks and usage tracking keep working. Stopping new charges doesn’t cancel open Checkout Sessions or subscriptions.4. What you’re responsible for
- Your terms with Your Customers. You must give Your Customers clear terms, prices, renewal and cancellation terms, refund policies and any disclosures the law requires, and get their consent before charging them. This includes automatic-renewal laws, consumer-protection laws, and laws on prepaid credit, gift cards or stored value that may apply to the credits you sell.
- Credits. You decide what your credits are worth, whether they expire, and whether they can be refunded. Credits granted through Ledger have no cash value from Ledger.
- Tax. You are responsible for working out, collecting, reporting and paying any sales tax, VAT, GST or other tax on your sales, and for any tax registrations. Where you turn on Stripe Tax, Stripe calculates the tax; that doesn’t change your responsibility for it.
- Refunds, disputes and chargebacks. You handle these in Stripe. When you refund a credit pack in full, or lose a dispute over one, Ledger expires its unused credits. Ledger doesn’t remove credits for any other refund or dispute; adjust the balance yourself if you need to.
- Usage data. Ledger bills what your systems record. You are responsible for sending accurate usage and for the results of choices you make, such as running the SDK in fail-open mode, which may leave some usage unrecorded during an outage.
- Your catalog. You are responsible for the plans, prices, credit amounts, caps and overage rates you publish, and for testing them in Sandbox first.
5. Overage
If a plan has overage turned on, Ledger lets Your Customers keep using a feature after their included credits run out, up to the cap you set, and bills the extra use:- usage beyond the included credits is recorded within the cap at the overage rate fixed when the billing period began;
- Ledger adds it to the customer’s next renewal invoice in your Stripe account, and a subscription that is cancelled gets a final invoice for any overage left;
- Ledger shows a summary of the overage terms on the Stripe Checkout page.
- telling Your Customers clearly, next to where they agree to buy, that the subscription renews until cancelled, how to cancel, the recurring price, that the amount can vary with overage, the overage rate and the cap, and that overage used before cancelling is billed on a final invoice;
- getting their express, affirmative consent to those terms, and keeping a record of it;
- showing the same terms when a customer changes plan or is charged without a Checkout page, such as an upgrade paid with a saved card;
- sending any confirmation the law requires after purchase, with the terms and how to cancel;
- letting Your Customers cancel online, as easily as they subscribed;
- giving notice before a change to a price, overage rate or cap takes effect, including a negotiated rate you set for one customer.