41–50 of 84 posts
What happens if Kable service is down for some reason?
Great question. Our libraries are set up to handle Kable failures. When a library request to Kable's server fails, dropped events will be logged as JSON for later processing. The Kable API is designed to handle backfilling of events, so if Kable ever goes down, we'll help you catch up on events that weren't recorded in real-time.
How do you deal with taxes? Or how do you help your customers deal with taxes?
As of today, Kable relies on our payment partners to calculate tax. If you connect your Stripe account to Kable, you can enable automatic tax calculation in your Stripe dashboard, and invoices generated by Kable will be taxed by Stripe. As we add other payment partners, we will follow the same pattern. In the future, though, we do plan to add the option to calculate taxes directly within Kable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great question. Our libraries are set up to handle Kable failures. When a library request to Kable's server fails, dropped events will be logged as JSON for later processing. The Kable API is designed to handle backfilling of events, so if Kable ever goes down, we'll help you catch up on events that weren't recorded in real-time.
That's for usage, but aren't auth requests going to Kable too?
Our libraries cache the valid (and invalid) keys we process. So if Kable goes down, users with steady traffic (whose keys remain cached) will remain unaffected. Users who have not yet had a key validated by Kable, though, will experience problems while Kable restarts.
We have redundancies in place to ensure that Kable downtime is minimized. Obviously no system is perfect, and outages can't be avoided 100%. But we employ all best practices around redundancies, rolling deployments, and rapid response to minimize the impacts of downtime
Congrats on the launch! How do you see yourself differentiating between Stripe billing?
Stripe is a payments company -- they are great at payments. They offer a full suite of tools (like subscriptions) around payments. But this is not their core competency.
Usage-based billing has three core components: * Defining pricing plans * Metering usage to generate invoices * Processing payments
Stripe is great at processing payments. But when it comes to defining usage-based pricing plans, and especially when it comes to metering usage, Stripe is actually pretty weak.
Pricing in Stripe is pretty brittle. You create products which have price IDs, and your code needs to understand these concepts. To evolve pricing for a customer, or to define a new pricing plan for an enterprise contract can be a pretty tricky thing to do.
And streaming usage data into Stripe is actually something that Stripe's docs recommends against. They recommend you aggregate your own usage metrics and post them infrequently into Stripe. Again, payments processing, not usage metering.
Kable's sweet spot as it pertains to billing is the first two items in that list. Pricing plans are super easy to define, manage, and evolve in Kable. Usage metering is our core competency. You don't need pricing concepts or external identifiers in your code. You record the *core concepts from your app* and Kable handles the rest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As of today, Kable relies on our payment partners to calculate tax. If you connect your Stripe account to Kable, you can enable automatic tax calculation in your Stripe dashboard, and invoices generated by Kable will be taxed by Stripe. As we add other payment partners, we will follow the same pattern. In the future, though, we do plan to add the option to calculate taxes directly within Kable.
Is there a way to integrate paddle?
> Our pricing is pay-as-you-go based on the volume of events we store and the revenue we help our customers generate. That means we get to dogfood our own software for usage-based billing! So what is your pricing? The website says "starting at $200 / month", but before I go to sign up and try to integrate, I'd like to be able to estimate if it'd be $200/mo for my company or $2,000/mo. P.S.: I signed up, even got to a…
Looks interesting! Do you guys offer any sort of visibility tools/reports into customer usage of different endpoints, tracking of actual API requests (including payloads/etc) per request, etc? Is it possible to use you guys just for billing if we already have our own auth?
With regard to endpoint visibility, yes, totally. One of our strengths is the ability to even price different endpoints differently. If you have endpoints that are high-value that you want to track differently than other endpoints, you can simply tag it, and Kable will monitor that endpoint as its own dimension. So yes, you can see which customers are calling which endpoints through our dashboard.
With regard to tracking request payloads, this is something we do not currently support. We've given this some thought, and while we might change our position in the future based on customer feedback, we are currently not storing customer request data. The reason for this is privacy. We want to be careful about what information we store from our customers' customers, so we require developers to explicitly define what information gets recorded in Kable.
Finally, with respect to billing and analytics and authentication as separate features or products: *ABSOLUTELY*. You can use Kable for billing and analytics without using Kable authentication. We want it to be super easy to use both, but we understand many customers have other systems for managing API keys or other parts of the stack. In this case, we recommend using Kable's `record` method, and using us for our core competencies of billing and analytics.