Choosing a billing vendor is one of the most consequential infrastructure decisions a growing business can make. Get it right, and you'll have a system that scales with your pricing model, handles global compliance automatically and keeps revenue flowing reliably. Get it wrong, and you're looking at months of rework and revenue leakage.

Stripe Billing is included as a reference point throughout treat it as a concrete example of what a mature billing platform looks like in production.

This template gives you a structured, end-to-end way to run a billing vendor request for proposal (RFP) from administrative ground rules to detailed requirements, commercials and evaluation scoring. It's built around the capabilities that matter most for subscription businesses in 2026: usage-based and multi-attribute pricing, payment recovery that's powered by machine learning (ML), real-time revenue analytics, global tax compliance and emerging requirements such as agentic commerce and embedded financial products.

This RFP template isn't meant to be used as a rigid form. It's more like a guide you can (and should) customise to your specific needs. Each section comes with prompts to help you write questions that get you useful answers, not just marketing blurbs. Fill in the blanks with specifics about your project, push for detail where it matters most, and cut anything that doesn't apply. When it's used well, this RFP template can save you time, reveal suitable vendors and better inform your final decision.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
  
• Section A: Administrative instructions
  
• Section B: Overview and scope of work
  
• Section C: Proposal instructions
  
• Section D: Evaluation process
  
• Section E: Core requirements
  
• Section F: Implementation and support
  
• Section G: Commercials
  
• Section H: Vendor profile
  
• Section I: References
  
• Section J: Appendixes
  

Cover page

The goal of the cover page is to tell vendors exactly what they're looking at and whom to talk to. Include the RFP title, your company's name, a short confidentiality notice and contact details for the person who manages the process. Dates matter, too. List the issue date and due date right up front so nobody can claim they missed them. Keep the cover page concise. It should be about orientation, not showing off what your design team can do.

Here's what to include in this section:

• Title: RFP for [project/service/product]
  
• Issuing organisation: [Your company]
  
• Confidentiality notice: (Short, NDA-bound language)
  
• Point of contact: [Name, title, email, phone]
  
• Issue date and due date
  

You might want to design your own branded RFP document. In that case, the outlines in each section can provide a strong foundation. Below, we've also added sample copy you can use.

Key dates

Submission format
All responses must be submitted electronically via email in PDF format. Pricing and scoring templates (provided separately in Excel) must be attached in their original formats.

File naming convention
[Vendor name][Project name]RFPResponse[Date].pdf

Purpose of this RFP
[Your company] is seeking a billing partner capable of supporting secure, multicurrency transactions, integrating easily with internal systems via modern APIs and delivering high reliability, proactive fraud detection and data transparency across regions.

This document outlines the requirements, evaluation criteria and process for submitting proposals.

Short confidentiality notice
This RFP contains confidential and proprietary information belonging to [your company]. It's provided solely for the purpose of preparing a response. Distribution beyond those directly involved in preparing a proposal is prohibited. By accepting this RFP, the recipient agrees to protect this information with at least the same degree of care they apply to protect their own confidential information.

Section A: Administrative instructions

This section sets the ground rules. Before vendors invest time in a response, they need to know how the process works, what's expected and what the timeline looks like. Ambiguity here creates problems later so be precise.

Here's what to include:

• Confidentiality and non-disclosure obligations
  
• Limitation of liability
  
• RFP timeline with key dates
  
• Submission format and file naming conventions
  
• Point of contact and communication rules
  
• Vendor acknowledgment form
  

Here's an example of how this could look.

A.1 Statement of confidentiality and non-disclosure

All information in this RFP is confidential and intended solely to enable the vendor to prepare a response. Vendors must not disclose, reproduce or distribute this RFP or any portion of it to third parties without prior written consent from [your company]. If the vendor includes proprietary information in its proposal, that information should be clearly labelled. [Your company] will treat it accordingly.

A.2 Limitation of financial liability

This RFP isn't an offer to contract. [Your company] is under no obligation to award a contract or reimburse costs incurred in preparing a response. Vendors are solely responsible for their own expenses throughout this process.

A.3 RFP timeline

A.4 Submission guidelines

• All proposals must be submitted by email to [contact email address].
  
• Vendors must acknowledge receipt within three business days of issue.
  
• Questions must be submitted in writing by the date listed in A.3.
  
• All communication must go through the designated RFP manager. Direct contact with other [your company] employees during the evaluation period isn't permitted and might result in disqualification.
  

A.5 Required submission documents

Each vendor must include the following materials in its submission.

A.6 Evaluation overview

[Your company] will evaluate proposals on billing functionality, technical architecture, global compliance coverage, payment recovery performance, revenue reporting depth, implementation approach and vendor stability. Vendors that demonstrate ML-driven optimisation, real-time analytics, strong API performance and readiness for agentic and AI-initiated billing workflows will be prioritised.

A.7 Vendor acknowledgment

Vendors must complete and return the acknowledgment below within three business days of receiving this RFP.

We acknowledge receipt of the RFP titled "[RFP name]" and confirm our intention to submit / not to submit a response.

Company name: ________________________

Authorised representative: ________________________

Title: ________________________

Date: ________

Section B: Overview and scope of work

A vague overview produces generic proposals. Give vendors the context they need to respond intelligently, such as your business model, pricing complexity, the markets you serve and the specific problems you're trying to solve. You could optionally include additional details to customise the overview, including headquarters and key markets, approximate annual revenue or billing volume and internal teams involved (e.g. Finance, Engineering, Compliance, RevOps, Customer Success).

Here's an example of how this could look.

B.1 Company background

[Your company] is a [global/regional] technology company that operates in [insert markets], serving [insert customer type] with [insert product or service description]. Our billing operations span [X] markets and support [describe pricing models such as usage-based, subscription and hybrid plans].

• We currently invoice [approximate volume] customers per month across [X] currencies. We're seeking a billing partner whose platform scales with our business, handles complex pricing logic without bespoke engineering, and complies with the tax and regulatory requirements of each market we operate in.
  

B.2 Project purpose

This RFP exists to identify a billing platform that supports the next phase of our growth. Our current setup [describe the gap (e.g. cannot handle usage-based pricing, lacks global tax compliance, doesn't integrate with our ERP system, cannot support AI-initiated subscription changes)].

Our ideal partner will enable:

• Flexible pricing model support usage-based, flat-rate, tiered, multi-attribute and hybrid in a single platform
  
• Automated global tax calculation and invoice compliance, including sales tax, VAT and country-specific formats
  
• Industry-leading payment recovery rates driven by ML-powered retry logic and intelligent dunning management
  
• Real-time subscription and revenue analytics accessible to both technical and non-technical teams
  
• Simple integration with our CRM, ERP, data warehouse and accounting systems via well-documented APIs
  
• Readiness for agentic commerce vendor systems that support subscription actions initiated by AI agents or automated workflows
  

B.3 Scope of work

Core deliverables:

• End-to-end subscription lifecycle management including trials, upgrades, downgrades, pauses and cancellations
  
• Support for diverse pricing models such as usage-based billing with granular aggregation, tiered pricing, multi-attribute pricing (e.g. seats plus usage) and instalment plans
  
• Automated tax calculation and localised invoicing across all markets where [your company] operates
  
• Integration with [CRM, ERP, data warehouse and accounting systems] via versioned, documented APIs
  
• Revenue recognition compliant with ASC 606 and IFRS 15, including waterfall reporting and deferred revenue handling
  
• ML-powered payment recovery with intelligent retry scheduling, network token support, automatic card updater and configurable dunning sequences
  
• Real-time dashboards that cover MRR, ARR, churn, trial conversion and recovery efficacy
  
• Customer self-service portal for subscription and payment management
  

Optional deliverables:

• AI-driven revenue forecasting and predictive churn scoring
  
• Support for multi-entity or hierarchical account structures
  
• Embedded billing capabilities for SaaS platforms that resell to their own customers
  
• Agentic commerce support APIs and authentication patterns that allow AI agents to initiate, modify and cancel subscriptions on behalf of customers
  
• Embedded financial products support for issuing, treasury or lending products integrated with billing
  

B.4 Out-of-scope work

Define what's excluded so vendors don't price or assume responsibility for it. Here are some examples:

• Core payment processing infrastructure (handled separately by Stripe)
  
• Fraud detection beyond standard billing-level controls
  
• Full ERP or general ledger functionality
  

B.5 Desired outcomes

• Payment recovery rate above [X]% within six months of going live
  
• Automated tax calculation that covers [X] markets at launch
  
• Time to invoice for new pricing models reduced from [current state] to [target]
  
• Full ASC 606compliant revenue reporting without manual reconciliation
  
• API response latency under 300ms at p99 for all billing operations
  

Section C: Proposal instructions

If you don't specify how you want proposals formatted, you'll receive everything from five-page slide decks to 200-page PDFs. This section standardises what you receive so you can compare vendors side by side.

Here's an example of how this could look.

C.1 Submission format and structure

Each proposal must follow this structure:

• Executive summary (three pages maximum)
  
• Responses to all requirements in Section E, numbered to match
  
• Completed pricing template in Excel
  
• Vendor profile and financial summary
  
• Minimum of three client references
  
• Supporting documents such as compliance certifications, case studies and API documentation excerpts
  

Submissions that deviate significantly or omit required elements might be deemed non-compliant.

C.2 Formatting requirements

• Narrative responses as PDF; pricing template as Excel file.
  
• Minimum 11pt font, one-inch margins, page numbers required.
  
• All monetary figures in USD unless otherwise specified.
  
• File naming: [Vendor name]BillingRFP[Date].pdf
  

C.3 Proposal content guidance

Executive summary

• Explain directly how your solution addresses [your company]'s goals in Section B.
  
• Lead with measurable outcomes recovery rates, authorisation rate improvements and deployment timelines not product descriptions.
  
• Include your vision for this partnership over three years.
  

Solution overview

• Describe how your platform handles complex pricing scenarios such as usage-based metering, multi-attribute pricing, midcycle plan changes and entitlement management.
  
• Detail your API architecture, SDK availability, webhook reliability and sandbox parity with production.
  
• Explain how your ML capabilities improve payment recovery and reduce churn.
  

Implementation plan

• Provide a draft project timeline with milestones: configuration, integration, testing, UAT and launch. Identify vendor and client responsibilities at each phase.
  

Security and compliance

• Confirm PCI DSS v4.0 compliance (effective March 2024) and most recent audit date.
  
• Describe data residency options and privacy controls for the GDPR and CCPA.
  
• Detail your incident response process and client notification timelines.
  

API and developer capabilities

• Provide API latency benchmarks (p50, p95 or p99), uptime history and your approach to versioning and backward compatibility.
  
• Include a link to your developer documentation or sandbox environment.
  

C.4 Clarification and questions

Questions must be submitted in writing by [question deadline] to [RFP manager's email]. Answers will be distributed to all participants simultaneously. No informal discussions with other [your company] employees are permitted during the process.

C.5 Proposal validity

Proposals must remain valid for 90 days from the submission deadline unless extended by written mutual agreement.

C.6 Right to reject or negotiate

[Your company] reserves the right to reject any proposal, request clarifications or enter parallel negotiations with one or more vendors. Participation doesn't constitute a commitment to purchase.

Section D: Evaluation process

Transparency in scoring pushes vendors to respond with evidence rather than marketing copy. Every criterion below maps to a specific question in Section E so vendors who read this know exactly where to focus.

Here's an example of how this could look.

D.1 Evaluation methodology

All proposals will be reviewed by a cross-functional team including Finance, Engineering, Compliance and RevOps. The evaluation runs in three stages:

• Compliance review: Confirm that all mandated documents are present and meet formatting requirements.
  
• Qualitative assessment: Score each submission against the weighted criteria below using a 15 scale where 5 is exceptional and 1 fails to meet the baseline.
  
• Demonstration and final review: Invite short-listed vendors for live platform demonstrations.
  

D.2 Evaluation criteria and weights

The above weights are adjustable depending on project priorities but must total 100%.

D.3 Demonstration requirements

Short-listed vendors will demonstrate:

• End-to-end billing flows in a live sandbox with subscription creation, midcycle plan change and usage-based invoice generation
  
• Real-time usage metering ingestion, aggregation and billing
  
• Dunning configuration, ML retry logic and recovery reporting dashboard
  
• API call walk-through including latency, error handling and webhook delivery confirmation
  
• Customer portal and internal dashboard functionality
  
• Agentic commerce scenario (i.e. an AI agent or automated workflow initiates a subscription action via API)
  

Vendors must provide temporary demo credentials valid for at least 10 business days after the demonstration.

D.4 Negotiation and contract award

[Your company] reserves the right to conduct clarification sessions, request best-and-final offers and negotiate with one or more vendors. No contract is binding until it's executed by both parties.

Evaluator notes remove before sending to vendors

• Score independently before group deliberation. Justify every score above 4 or below 2 with evidence from the submission or demo.
  
• Treat "Standard" capability claims skeptically and require documentation or a live demo walk-through.
  
• Prioritise vendors with documented ML recovery outcomes, API latency under 300ms at p99 and production parity sandbox environments.
  
• Weight the agentic commerce criterion more heavily if your road map includes AI-driven customer journeys or autonomous subscription management.
  
• Flag warning signs such as vague pricing, compliance gaps in your key markets, missing sandbox and no published API SLA.
  

Section E: Core requirements

This is the most important section. Require factual, evidence-backed responses. Any vendor worth short-listing can point to production metrics, published documentation and real client examples not just claimed capabilities. For each requirement, vendors must indicate one of these statuses: Standard (in production today), Configurable (requires setup), Custom (requires development) or N/A.

Here's an example of how this could look.

E.1 Selling and accepting orders

For sales teams

For the checkout flow

A checkout experience that loses customers at the payment step is a billing problem, not just a UX problem. Expect vendors to provide documented conversion lift data from production environments not estimated figures.

For SaaS platforms

For global compliance

Global compliance is a continuous operational requirement. Compliance standards change: PCI DSS v4.0 went into effect March 2024, and jurisdictions from India to Germany and Brazil impose specific billing obligations. Your vendor needs to track and implement these automatically, instead of waiting for you to ask.

E.2 Billing and subscription lifecycle management

Pricing model flexibility

A billing platform that handles only flat-rate subscriptions is already limiting your go-to-market strategy. Usage-based and multi-attribute pricing are standard for SaaS and infrastructure businesses. Your vendor needs to support them natively, not through work-arounds.

Automation

The operational value of a billing platform scales directly with what it automates. Manual intervention in billing workflows is a source of errors, delays and avoidable costs.

Ease of use

E.3 Collecting payments and reducing costs

Payment methods and authorisation performance

Payment method coverage and authorisation rates are direct revenue drivers, not secondary concerns. A 1% improvement in authorisation rate on a recurring billing portfolio is real money. The difference between vendors often comes down to network scale: ML-based retry logic works well only when the model is trained on enough signals to know which parameters to adjust for a given issuer, card type and failure code. Stripe's Adaptive Acceptance, for example, draws on data across millions of businesses to refine retry attempts in real time. That's the benchmark to hold other vendors against. Require documented authorisation rate benchmarks from production environments and ask vendors to explain specifically how they achieve them.

Cost optimisation

E.4 Retaining customers and recovering revenue

Reducing involuntary churn

Failed payments are the single largest driver of involuntary churn for subscription businesses. How a vendor handles payment recovery is a core competency that deserves the same scrutiny as pricing model support. Stripe's Smart Retries, included with Stripe Billing at no additional cost, uses ML to identify the optimal retry timing per customer, instead of running a fixed schedule. Network tokens minimise declines further by updating card credentials automatically when underlying details change, without requiring any customer action. When you're evaluating other vendors on this dimension, use Stripe's recovery performance as your baseline: require production recovery rate data, ask how the retry logic is trained and treat vague answers as a signal.

Reducing voluntary churn

E.5 Agentic commerce and embedded financial capabilities

AI agents and automated workflows are increasingly initiating commercial transactions. They can schedule subscription changes, respond to customer requests and manage billing events without direct human action. Billing infrastructure built in 2026 needs to account for this. Vendors who haven't thought about agentic billing will create integration bottlenecks as you scale AI-driven customer experiences.

Agentic commerce

Agentic commerce refers to AI agents or automated systems that initiate, modify or cancel subscriptions and billing actions on behalf of customers. This requires APIs and authentication patterns that are purpose-built for machine-to-machine interactions, not adaptations of human-facing flows.

Embedded financial products

Billing infrastructure that connects to adjacent financial products (e.g. card issuing, treasury, lending) creates compounding value for platforms and marketplaces. If you offer or plan to offer financial products alongside your core product, your billing vendor's ability to integrate with those products matters.

E.6 Reporting, analytics and revenue recognition

Business performance reporting

Billing data is revenue data. Your vendor should give your Finance, RevOps and leadership teams real-time visibility into what's happening across your subscriber base, not CSV exports you reconcile manually after the fact.

Revenue recognition and reconciliation

If your team is manually building revenue waterfall reports or reconciling billing data to your general ledger, that's a gap your next vendor should close. Compliance with ASC 606 and IFRS 15 should be built in, not appended after the fact.

Dispute management

E.7 API performance and developer experience

A billing platform you can't integrate reliably or that degrades under load is a serious liability. Evaluate API quality with the same rigor you apply to functional coverage. Ask for production performance data, not benchmarks from synthetic test environments.

API performance

Developer experience

Integrations

E.8 Security, compliance and data privacy

Compliance is a moving target. PCI DSS v4.0 went into effect March 2024 and introduced new requirements regarding authentication, monitoring and targeted risk analysis. GDPR enforcement has intensified since 2023, with regulators issuing record fines for data handling violations. Your vendor needs to stay current, not catch up.

E.9 Scalability and reliability

E.10 Vendor certification statement

I hereby certify that all responses are accurate as of the submission date and that capabilities marked Standard or Configurable are currently available in production environments. Claims not supported by documentation or a live demonstration will not be evaluated.

Authorised representative: ________________________
Title: ________________________
Date: ________

Evaluator notes remove before sending to vendors

• Require quantitative evidence for all performance claims, such as recovery rates, authorisation rates, API latency benchmarks and uptime figures.
  
• Validate API performance claims in the sandbox demo measure actual latency, not vendor-provided figures.
  
• Flag any vendor that cannot demonstrate agentic billing scenarios in a sandbox environment.
  
• Treat missing ASC 606 support or no production parity sandbox as a disqualification for billing-mature businesses.
  
• Verify PCI DSS v4.0 compliance specifically as v3.2.1 sunsetted on 31 March 2024.
  

E.11 How does Stripe address these requirements?

If you're evaluating Stripe as your billing partner, here's how our platform maps to the requirements in Section E. We've grouped our capabilities by the areas where the underlying architecture decisions have the most impact on your business.

Subscription and pricing model flexibility

Stripe Billing supports more than 15 pricing models nativelyflat-rate, tiered, volume, graduated, and morewithout requiring custom engineering for each go-to-market motion. For usage-based billing, Metronome, a Stripe product, processes up to 100K events per second and handles metering across any attribute you define: API calls, computing, outcomes, seats, or custom dimensions. For businesses that run complex enterprise contracts, Metronome supports prepaid and postpaid commitments, midcycle amendments, and custom discounting. New pricing models can be launched with centralised rate cards, with updates pushed instantly across your subscriber base. For full documentation, see Stripe Billing and usage-based billing.

Payment recovery

Failed payments are the largest driver of involuntary churn for subscription businesses, and recovery performance is where billing platforms most visibly diverge. Stripe's Smart Retries uses ML to determine the optimal retry timing per customer drawing on signals across Stripe's network rather than run a static retry calendar. Network token support means that when a customer's underlying card details change, Stripe updates the token automatically, minimising declines without requiring any customer action. The automatic card updater covers Visa, Mastercard, Amex and Discover and runs in the background on every active subscription. Smart Retries and dunning management are included with Stripe Billing at no additional cost. For documentation on revenue recovery configuration, see Stripe Docs.

Global tax and compliance

Stripe Tax calculates sales tax, VAT and GST across more than 100 countries and 600 product categories, updating in real time as rates change, with a documented historical uptime of 99.999%. Coverage spans B2B, B2C, subscription and marketplace models so you can expand into new markets without rebuilding your tax logic each time. Tax collection can be switched on in a new jurisdiction in seconds from the Dashboard or with a single line of code and Stripe Tax integrates with filing partners to handle remittance where supported. For current jurisdiction coverage and compliance documentation, see Stripe Tax.

Revenue reporting and recognition

Stripe Revenue Recognition automates accrual accounting in line with ASC 606 and IFRS 15, generating revenue waterfall charts, deferred revenue schedules and journal entries directly from your billing data with no manual reconciliation required. Every recognised and deferred revenue amount is traceable back to the underlying customer and invoice, making audits substantially faster. For teams that need custom SQL access to their billing data, Stripe Sigma provides an interactive query environment in the Dashboard. Stripe Data Pipeline syncs your Stripe data to Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift for warehouse-native analytics, with Sigma access included. For details, see Stripe Revenue Recognition and Stripe Data Pipeline.

API and developer experience

Stripe's RESTful API ships with server-side SDKs for Node.js, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, PHP and .NET, plus mobile SDKs for iOS and Android. The API is versioned by release date, with deprecation notices preannounced in the SDK README files and changelog, and an extended support window of one to two years per language version after end of life. Stripe's sandbox environment now called Sandboxes provides full production parity for all billing flows including usage metering, dunning management and revenue recognition, with no test mode restrictions on query volume. Stripe's 90-day average uptime runs at five nines. For API reference, SDK documentation and sandbox access, see Stripe Docs.

Agentic commerce

Stripe has been building for agentic billing since before most vendors named the category. The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed with OpenAI and live in ChatGPT's Instant Checkout, provides an open standard for AI agents to initiate and complete transactions programmatically. Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens let agents act on behalf of buyers using scoped, limited-time credentials that never expose underlying card details with full audit logging and webhook events on every action. For subscription businesses, Stripe Billing's API design supports machine-to-machine workflows directly: agents can create, modify and cancel subscriptions using granular restricted API keys with permissions scoped to exactly what each agent needs. The Stripe Agent Toolkit and Stripe MCP server give developers prebuilt integrations with frameworks such as LangChain, OpenAI's Agents SDK and CrewAI. For documentation, see Stripe agentic commerce and Stripe MCP.

To see any of these capabilities in a live environment, contact Stripe sales to arrange a sandbox demonstration, or visit Stripe Docs for full technical documentation.

Section F: Implementation and support

The best billing platform can fail if the implementation doesn't go smoothly. This section investigates whether the vendor has the methodology, resources and support model to get you live without disrupting your billing operations and keep you running reliably afterward.

Here's an example of how this could look.

F.1 Implementation approach and timeline

Vendors must describe:

• Project management framework (agile, waterfall or hybrid) and how progress is tracked and reported to the client
  
• Typical time to go live for clients of comparable scale and pricing complexity
  
• How integration risks particularly with CRM, ERP and data warehouse systems are identified and mitigated
  
• How a parallel billing run or cutover strategy protects revenue continuity during migration
  

F.2 Resourcing and governance

Vendors should provide:

• Org chart or RACI diagram for the implementation team
  
• Confirmation of whether key roles are in-house or subcontracted
  
• Named account manager and solution architect assigned to this engagement
  
• Escalation hierarchy and decision-making cadence
  

F.3 Training and knowledge transfer

Vendors should describe:

• Training available for Finance, RevOps, Engineering and Customer Success
  
• Availability of on-demand training, documentation and certification paths
  
• How training materials stay current with new product releases
  

F.4 Support model and service levels

Vendors must specify:

• Support tiers and what's included at each
  
• Availability of 24/7 support for major billing incidents a billing outage is a revenue outage
  
• Response time SLAs by severity level
  
• How clients are notified in real time during incidents
  
• Historical uptime performance with a minimum target is 99.9% and a preference for at least 99.99%
  

F.5 Maintenance and upgrades

Vendors should explain:

• How product releases are communicated (e.g. release notes, changelogs, advance notice periods)
  
• API versioning and deprecation policy (minimum of 12 months' advance notice for breaking changes)
  
• Whether upgrades can be deployed without billing downtime
  

F.6 Continuous improvement

Describe how you use platform analytics, ML-driven insight and proactive monitoring to improve billing performance over time. Provide specific examples of measurable improvements delivered to existing clients, such as increased recovery rate, better authorisation rate, and reduction in billing-related support tickets.

F.7 Vendor attestation

I certify that all implementation and support details provided here are accurate as of the submission date and reflect current production practices and service levels.

Authorised representative: ________________________
Title: ________________________
Date: ________

Evaluator notes remove before sending to vendors

• Validate timeline commitments against comparable engagements. Ask for specific examples, not ranges.
  
• Confirm 24/7 support is genuine. Request examples of recent response times to major incidents.
  
• Ask whether the implementation team is the same team that handles postlaunch support.
  
• Require written API deprecation policy before contract signature.
  

Section G: Commercials

Billing platform pricing can be opaque. This section standardises how vendors present costs so you can compare them properly. If you don't require itemized disclosure up front, you'll discover bundled fees and minimum commitments only after the contract is signed.

Here's an example of how this could look.

G.1 Pricing structure overview

Vendors must provide:

• Itemised pricing for all components, including platform fees, per-transaction fees, usage fees and add-ons
  
• A narrative that explains pricing assumptions such as volume tiers, currency mix and billing event estimates
  
• Clear identification of any minimum monthly commitments or threshold pricing
  
• All figures in USD (including conversion logic if they're quoting other currencies)
  

G.2 Pricing components

G.3 Volume tiers

Provide a sensitivity analysis that shows how pricing changes at the following volumes.

G.4 Contract terms and flexibility

• Available contract lengths and associated pricing incentives
  
• Whether pricing scales down automatically if volume decreases
  
• Renegotiation process for multiyear contracts
  
• Minimum spend requirements
  
• Exit clauses and data portability terms (i.e. how is your data returned, in what format and on what timeline?)
  

G.5 Assumptions and dependencies

List all commercial assumptions that underpin your pricing, including volume minimums, exclusivity requirements, specific payment methods and geographic scope. Unstated assumptions discovered after contract execution might be treated as a material misrepresentation.

G.6 Vendor certification

I certify that the pricing and commercial information in this proposal is complete and accurate as of the submission date and reflects all applicable discounts, fees and terms.

Authorised representative: ________________________
Date: ________

Evaluator notes remove before sending to vendors

• Reconcile all figures against the Excel pricing sheet discrepancies are a warning sign
  
• Watch for bundled fees that obscure per-unit costs, particularly for metering and dunning management.
  
• Assess data portability terms carefully. Lock-in often happens at the data layer, not the contract layer.
  
• Flag any vendor that cannot provide volume sensitivity analysis.
  

Section H: Vendor profile

A billing platform is a long-term infrastructure partner. You need to know the company behind the product its financial health, engineering depth and trajectory not just whether today's feature list looks right.

Here's an example of how this could look.

H.1 Company overview

Provide a two- to three-paragraph summary that covers your history, mission and market position. Emphasise your experience in supporting enterprise-scale, multimarket billing operations and your track record for maintaining compliance as regulations develop.

H.2 Leadership and key personnel

Include brief bios (three to five lines) for key leaders involved in this engagement. Describe their technical or compliance expertise and any relevant certifications.

H.3 Financial stability

Provide audited financial statements or equivalent evidence of solvency. Private companies should provide CFO letters that certify liquidity. Describe your funding structure, if applicable.

H.4 Certifications and compliance

H.5 Product road map

Provide a high-level road map that covers upcoming releases over the next 12 18 months. Highlight planned investments in ML-powered features, agentic commerce support, global compliance coverage and API performance. Explain how customer feedback influences your prioritisation.

H.6 Partnerships and systems

List key technology and channel partnerships relevant to this engagement. Describe how these enhance reliability, compliance coverage or integration depth.

H.7 Environmental and sustainability practices

Describe practices that reduce environmental impact (e.g. digital receipts by default, paperless invoicing, insight into payment method environmental footprint). Explain how sustainability is embedded in your platform operations.

H.8 Vendor statement of accuracy

I certify that all information in Section H is accurate as of the submission date and that [vendor] has the financial, technical and operational capacity to perform the described services.

Authorised representative: ________________________
Date: ________

Section I: References

References from comparable customers tell you more than any demo can. Prioritise references that look like your business with similar pricing complexity, scale and regulatory footprint. Generic references from different verticals or much smaller businesses don't predict your experience.

Here's an example of how this could look.

I.1 Reference requirements

Vendors must provide a minimum of three client references that meet these criteria:

• Comparable billing volume to [your company]
  
• Similar pricing model complexity (usage-based or multi-attribute pricing preferred)
  
• Overlapping geographic and regulatory footprint
  
• Active customer in production for at least 12 months
  

I.2 Reference table

I.3 Reference outcome summary

For each reference, provide measurable outcomes such as payment recovery improvement, authorisation rate change, deployment timeline and revenue recognition automation achieved. Include client testimonials where available.

I.4 Reference validation

I confirm that each client has consented to serve as a reference and that all information provided is accurate.

Authorised representative: ________________________
Date: ________

Evaluator notes remove before sending to vendors

• Call at least two references by phone written summaries are curated.
  
• Ask specifically about implementation experience and what went wrong, not just the platform in steady state.
  
• Ask references whether the vendor's ML recovery claims held up in production.
  
• Flag generic, unverifiable or clearly mismatched references.
  

Section J: Appendixes

J.1 Submission checklist (vendor use)

Attach as the first page of your response packet. Incomplete submissions might be excluded from evaluation.

J.2 Glossary of terms

J.3 Evaluation scoring matrix (internal use)

For each vendor, calculate the following:

• Billing (25%)
  
• API (15%)
  
• Recovery (15%)
  
• Compliance (15%)
  
• Reporting (10%)
  
• Agentic (5%)
  
• Support (5%)
  
• Commercials (10%)
  
• Weighted total
  

J.4 Billing requirements quick-reference checklist

A condensed checklist for vendor self-assessment before submission.

Selling and accepting orders

• CRM integration for quote creation
  
• Quote-to-subscription and quote-to-invoice conversion
  
• Multicurrency quoting
  
• Web, mobile and in-person checkout
  
• Saved credentials or Link equivalent for returning customers
  
• Fraud detection with low false-decline rates
  
• 3DS2 with PSD2 exemption handling
  
• ACH, SEPA, preauthorised debit and Bacs mandate support
  
• RBI mandate compliance
  
• Kndigungsbutton in Germany for single-click cancellation
  
• Locally compliant invoice templates including Brazil's Nota Fiscal
  
• OFAC and sanctions screening
  

Billing and subscription management

• Flat-rate, tiered, volume and graduated pricing
  
• Usage-based billing with configurable aggregation
  
• Multi-attribute pricing (seats and usage)
  
• Entitlement management for feature gating
  
• Free trials, prepayment and instalments
  
• Automated tax calculation for sales tax and VAT
  
• Proration logic
  
• Bulk subscription changes and hierarchical accounts
  
• Customer self-service portal
  

Payments, recovery and authorisation

• Cards, wallets, bank debits and bank transfers
  
• Network token support for recurring authorisation improvement
  
• ML-powered dunning management with dynamic retry (Adaptive Acceptance or equivalent)
  
• Automatic card updater
  
• Predictive retry with documented recovery rate
  
• Local acquiring
  
• Level II or III data and AVS or ZIP code pass-through
  
• FX fee optimisation
  

Agentic and embedded capabilities

• Machine-to-machine API authentication for agent-initiated billing
  
• Granular API permissions or OAuth scopes
  
• Audit trail for agent-initiated actions
  
• Card issuing and treasury integration
  
• BNPL or financing at checkout
  

Reporting and revenue recognition

• Real-time dashboards for MRR, ARR, churn and NRR
  
• Recovery efficacy and deflection reporting
  
• Data warehouse connectivity
  
• ASC 606 and IFRS 15 revenue recognition
  
• Revenue waterfall and deferred revenue schedules
  
• ERP and accounting system integration
  
• AI-driven revenue forecasting
  

API, security and technical

• API latency under 300ms at p99, documented from production
  
• At least 99.9% uptime SLA with historical data
  
• Full sandbox with production parity
  
• Versioned API with 12-month deprecation notice
  
• PCI DSS v4.0 (March 2024)
  
• SOC 2 Type II
  
• GDPR and CCPA data privacy controls
  
• Data residency options
  

J.5 Vendor submission certification

I certify that this submission is complete and that all information provided is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I acknowledge that [your company] reserves the right to verify any claims made in this response.

Company name: ________________________
Authorised representative: ________________________
Title: ________________________
Signature: ________________________
Date: ________

How Stripe Billing can help

Stripe Billing lets you bill and manage customers however you want from simple recurring billing to usage-based billing and sales-negotiated contracts. Start accepting recurring payments globally in minutes no code required or build a custom integration using the API.

Stripe Billing can help you:

• Offer flexible pricing: Respond to user demand faster with flexible pricing models, including usage-based, tiered, flat-fee plus overage and more. Support for coupons, free trials, prorations and add-ons is built-in.

• Expand globally: Increase conversion by offering customers' preferred payment methods. Stripe supports 125+ local payment methods and 130+ currencies.

• Increase revenue and reduce churn: Improve revenue capture and reduce involuntary churn with Smart Retries and recovery workflow automations. Stripe recovery tools helped users recover over $8.2 billion in revenue in 2025.

• Boost efficiency: Use Stripe's modular tax, revenue reporting and data tools to consolidate multiple revenue systems into one. Easily integrate with third-party software.

Learn more about Stripe Billing or get started today.