Aeion Billing vs Stripe Billing & Chargebee
Stop giving up 0.5% to 0.7% of your total revenue just to run a recurring `for` loop. Discover why enterprises are migrating to native, zero-markup billing infrastructure.
Calculate Your Billing Savings
Decisive Architectural Advantages
Zero Percentage Markups
External subscription tools charge you a percentage of your revenue just for orchestrating the payment logic. Aeion Billing provides the exact same orchestration software completely free, native to your OS.
Kernel-Level Limit Enforcement
With Stripe Billing, you have to query an external API to check if a user is allowed to create another "Project." Aeion's limit enforcement runs natively inside your application code, physically blocking the database transaction the instant a plan limit is hit.
Universal Provider Gateway
If you want to use Adyen in Europe and Stripe in the US, Chargebee charges enterprise rates to combine them. Aeion OS connects Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Braintree, and Square side by side and routes to the right one — so you're never locked to a single processor's rails or regional coverage.
Unified Immutable Ledger
Your user identity, order history, and recurring invoices live in exactly the same Postgres database. No more "Syncing to Stripe" errors or complex ETL pipelines for your finance team to reconcile.
What "Native" Actually Buys You
Zero markup is the headline, but the deeper win is that billing isn't a separate system you keep in sync — it runs on the same Postgres database, the same event bus, and the same access layer your application already uses.
- License lifecycle, not raw subscriptions: Stripe gives you a generic subscription object. Aeion tracks a real module-license state machine —
trial → active → expired → cancelled, withsuspendedas the payment-failure branch — so you always know exactly what a tenant is entitled to without reconstructing it from Stripe metadata. - Dunning that runs itself: A failed payment retries on a fixed 1-day / 3-day / 7-day cadence. The account stays active through all three attempts; only after the third failure do the linked subscription and module license move to suspended automatically, and an event fires so notifications and other modules can react.
- One call for license state: A single request returns whether a tenant has a license, its tier and status, its feature map, its usage limits, trial info, and the next billing date — instead of a fan-out of Stripe reads your code has to stitch together.
- Events, not ETL: Every billing state change emits an event other modules subscribe to. A failed payment can open a Helpdesk ticket; a suspension can flip a module's UI banner — with no CSV export or nightly sync job in between.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Aeion Billing replaces "Stripe Billing" (the subscription orchestration software), but you still use Stripe (or PayPal/Adyen) as your underlying payment processor to actually move the money.
Our dedicated migration tool can ingest a CSV of active subscriptions from Stripe or Chargebee and map them directly onto native Aeion subscriptions and module licenses, transferring the billing state without interrupting active plans.
Failed payments retry on a fixed cadence — 1 day, then 3 days, then 7 days — for a maximum of three attempts. That's an 11-day grace window in which the account stays active. If all three retries fail, the subscription and license auto-suspend.
Yes. Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Braintree, and Square can be connected simultaneously and routed to, so you can serve different regions or fall back across processors without paying enterprise combination fees.
It's binary today. Usage is unrestricted until it reaches the configured limit for that metric, at which point the operation is blocked with an upgrade prompt. There isn't a separate 80%-usage warning tier yet — a limit is either not reached (allowed) or reached (blocked).