Usage-based pricing with Paddle (Pay as you go)

Paddle has become one of the most popular payment service providers in Europe and across the globe. Its key advantage lies in acting as a merchant of record: Paddle takes care of VAT, sales tax, compliance, fraud, and payment operations in over 200 markets. This makes it especially attractive for software and API providers who want to scale internationally without getting lost in the complexity of payments infrastructure.

But while Paddle is powerful, it isn’t built to handle every monetization strategy out of the box.

Why usage-based pricing matters

In the world of APIs, monetization often goes beyond flat monthly fees. Many providers want to bill customers based on actual usage — the number of requests, characters processed, minutes streamed, messages sent, or any other metric tied to value.

This pay-as-you-go model is hugely popular because:

• Customers only pay for what they use, lowering the barrier to entry.
• Pricing scales naturally with adoption — light users pay less, power users pay more.
• It aligns the customer’s spend with the value delivered by the API.
• It reduces churn, since customers don’t feel locked into a fixed plan that may not fit their needs.

From a business perspective, usage-based pricing is one of the most flexible and fair ways to grow revenue in step with customer success.

The challenge with Paddle

Here’s the catch: while Paddle is excellent for subscriptions and one-time charges, it does not support pay-per-use pricing models out of the box.

That means API providers who want to monetize with usage-based billing need to either build their own custom layer on top of Paddle, or look for a solution that bridges this gap.

How Nadles solves it

This is where Nadles comes in.

Nadles adds a billing layer on top of Paddle’s great payment processing and merchant-of-record capabilities. With its custom-built billing engine, Nadles automatically collects usage data through its API Gateway and translates it into pricing models that Paddle alone doesn’t support.

Pricing models supported by Nadles include:

• Standard pricing: flat or per-unit rates (metered or unmetered).
• Package pricing: customers buy bundles of usage (e.g. 10,000 requests).
• Graduated pricing: each tier has a price, and usage is billed progressively.
• Volume pricing: unit cost decreases as usage increases.
• Flat fees + usage: combine a fixed base fee with metered charges.
• Top-ups: customers can purchase additional usage on demand.

This flexibility means you can design pricing that reflects the true value of your API, whether it’s charging per minute of voice synthesis, per GB of data processed, or per 1,000 messages sent.

Bringing it all together

By combining Paddle and Nadles, you get the best of both worlds:

• Paddle handles global payments, compliance, fraud, and taxes as your merchant of record.
• Nadles extends Paddle with usage-based pricing models, collects usage automatically, and provides you with a fully white-label user portal.

Conclusion

If you want to accept payments with Paddle but are missing usage-based pricing, try Nadles. It gives you the missing usage-based pricing models while letting Paddle do what it does best — handle payments and compliance at scale.