Choose your billing solution
Getting started with Airwallex Billing is easy, whether you want to build complex usage-based billing or simple subscriptions and invoices.
| One-off purchases (invoicing) | Subscriptions | Usage-based billing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Description | A single, non-recurring charge for a specific item or service. This is ideal for initial setup fees, hardware purchases, or individual product sales. | This is the classic model: customers pay a fixed, recurring fee at a set interval (like monthly or annually) for ongoing access to a service. | Customers pay based on their actual consumption of a specific metric (e.g., number of API calls, amount of data stored, or messages sent). Costs scale with value. |
| Best suited for | Any single transaction that doesn't require recurring access, such as consultancy fees, deposits, or one-time add-ons. | Products with predictable costs and fixed value, like streaming services, membership programs, or SaaS with unlimited use tiers. | Services where consumption is highly variable, like cloud computing, telecommunications, or complex software platforms (pay-as-you-go). |
| Airwallex setup | Requires a product, a one-off price, and a one-time invoice. | Requires a product, a recurring price, and a subscription. | Requires a product, a usage price, a subscription, and tracking of usage events & meters (coming soon). |
Invoicing
Generate invoices and get paid online with over 160+ payment methods.
- Create and send one-off or recurring invoices without code.
- Track payment status and due dates.
- Smart retries and automated email reminders for overdue invoices.
- Accept payments online via 160+ payment methods and reconcile them automatically.
- Issue credit notes and partial refunds.
Get started with Invoicing.
Subscriptions
Manage simple fixed price and multi-frequency subscription pricing models.
- Flexible pricing models, from simple flat fees, per unit rates, multi-frequency subscriptions.
- Easily offer discounts, free trials, and proration.
- Retry failed payments and send automatic email notifications, reminders, and invoices.
- Create meters to measure complex usage metrics and bill on actual consumption.
Get started with Subscriptions.
Usage-based billing
Charge customers for actual consumption with usage events and meters.
- Align your revenue directly with the value your customers receive by billing for actual consumption.
- Ingest high-volume usage data and transform it into billable quantities with flexible aggregation.
- Automate billing in arrears, allowing you to collect payments for pay-as-you-go and hybrid plans.
- Scale your billing infrastructure seamlessly alongside your business growth.
Get started with Usage-based billing.
Send a customer a link to pay
If you need to send a customer specific link to pay certain fees — for example by email or from your operations team — use a digital invoice, not Billing Checkout.
- Digital invoice: Create and finalize an invoice, then share the digital invoice link. The link remains valid for 35 days after the payment due date. Obtain a new link from the Airwallex web app or API if needed.
- Billing Checkout: For customers checking out on your website or app in real time. Create the checkout when they click Pay or Subscribe. The URL expires after 1 hour and cannot be extended.
- Payment Links: A separate Payments product for one-off payment collection. Payment Links are not integrated with Billing and cannot create Billing invoices or subscriptions.
See Choose Billing Checkout, invoices, or Payment Links for a full comparison.
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