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The Autumn flow

The typical Autumn flow looks like this:

1

Define your pricing model in the Autumn dashboard

The dashboard is where you define which of your users get access to what, and how much they’re charged for it. Here, you’ll create products and manage your customers.

2

Call attach when a customer wants to purchase a product

From your application, when your customer wants to purchase one of your price plans, the attach endpoint will return a Stripe checkout URL.

Once they’ve purchased, Autumn grants access to the product’s features that were defined in the dashboard.

If the customer is already paying for a plan, this will automatically handle any upgrades and downgrades too.

3

Check whether a customer has access to something

From your application, you can check in real-time whether a customer has access to:

  • a product (eg, pro tier)
  • a feature balance (eg, 10 remaining credits)
  • a feature flag (eg, premium AI models)

Autumn will return whether they’re allowed access, and you can use this to control access to your features. When you want to update your pricing model, you can do so without changing any of your code.

4

Track usage for usage-based features

For your usage-based features, if Autumn tells you they’re allowed access, you can track their usage to update their balance.

This means Autumn can enforce any usage limits you set (ie, by returning allowed: false once they hit a balance of 0). It also allows you to charge for usage (eg, $1 per AI tokens used), if you have a usage-based pricing model.

5

Display customer's information and balances

When using usage-based features, you’ll typically want to display the customer’s balance to them. You can do this from the customers route or hook, which will return customer information, the product they’ve purchased, and the balance of any usage-based features.

This means all of the logic that you would typically have to build yourself is done for you.

  • How do I limit usage of this feature to 10 per month, then reset?
  • How would I bill users who go over the limit?
  • How do I build in-app flows for upgrading, downgrading, cancelling?
  • What if I want add-ons, or credits?
  • My billing is at the org level. How do I track feature limits at the user level?
  • What happens to their usage if they upgrade, or downgrade, or cancel?
  • How can I block access if payment fails?
  • How would I migrate people if I change my pricing?
  • What should I do if I want a custom plan for different customers?

Autumn takes care of all of this, and more.

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Why use Autumn?

Autumn is loved by developers, founders and fast-growing startups because it’s easy to integrate and billing never has to be touched again.

  1. The simplest integration you’ll find - Just 2 API calls to set up any pricing model. You don’t need to deal with webhooks, state syncing, or deal with any of Stripe’s APIs.
  2. Enforce access limits - Autumn knows who’s paying for which product and what features they have access to. Just check if a customer has access, then track any usage if needed.
  3. Billing flows handled - Upgrades, downgrades, failed payments, and more. Autumn takes care of it all, with customizable UI components that “just work” out of the box.
  4. Make changes without touching code - Make pricing changes, set custom plans, or launch new types of pricing without going through engineering. Versioning, grandfathering and migrations is easy through the Autumn dashboard.

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What Autumn isn’t

  • A Stripe billing replacement: although you don’t need to deal with Stripe’s APIs, you are still using Stripe’s subscriptions, payments and invoicing.
  • Another metered billing product: Autumn easily handles usage-based billing up to 100 events per second, but there are many providers out there that specialize if you need more.
  • For purely sales-led companies: Autumn is designed to be used by product-led, or hybrid product-sales teams. If your customers only pay via custom invoices, Autumn is probably not for you.

Now that you understand how Autumn works, check out one of the quickstart guides to get started!