I've been looking for a solution everywhere after I saw PayPal mentioned Metered Billing on their developer page.
I would like to use PayPal for my SaaS, implementing a metered billing solution for billing my customers on a monthly basis a variable amount depending on their usage rate of the service.
I do remember an option for authorizing PayPal to give some software permission to execute payments without any further action from the side of the customer. Unfortunately, I cannot find any valid documentation, and not sure if is possible at all right now.
Is metered billing an option using the PayPal API?
Thank you so much!
What you are looking for is a "Reference Transactions" solution, which use PayPal Billing Agreements. It can be tested in sandbox, but to use it in live, the business account would need to be approved for this feature by PayPal. To do this the account owner would need to contact their PayPal account manager or PayPal's general customer support (not MTS), and explain the business need for this feature.
As far as implementing the solution, the only public documentation is for classic APIs: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/ec-set-up-reference-transactions/ . Any newer API or vault solution isn't publicly documented currently, though I have seen some links surface about a v2 vault solution.
So, you can always contact PayPal's support and ask if there's something they'd rather you implement than classic APIs. The first hurdle is the business approval for the feature mentioned earlier.