How Edge Works
Four billing modes, one shared foundation
What It Is
Edge is a billing engine that unifies invoicing, subscriptions, recurring invoices, and trigger billing under one architecture. Unlike platforms that bolt these together as separate modules with their own databases and product catalogs, Edge was designed so all four modes share the same data layer.
A billable item defined once can appear on an invoice, in a subscription plan, or as a trigger charge. A billing customer created once can be invoiced, subscribed, and enrolled in triggers simultaneously. Revenue from all sources flows into one ledger — there is no reconciliation needed between separate systems.
Why It Matters
Without unified billing, businesses fragment their billing across tools — invoices in one system, subscriptions in another, custom code for usage-based charges. This means duplicated product catalogs where the same service is defined three different ways, separate customer payment records that drift out of sync, and no single view of revenue without manual spreadsheet consolidation.
Edge eliminates this fragmentation by putting all billing in one place with one set of customers, one product catalog, and one revenue table. When you look at a billing customer in Edge, you see everything — their subscriptions, their invoices, their trigger enrollments, and every payment they have ever made, regardless of which billing mode generated it.
How It Works
Edge is built on three shared pillars that every billing mode uses.
Billing Customers are the unified payment identity. One record per contact stores the gateway preference (Stripe or PayPal), payment method (card, bank account, or PayPal vault token), trigger billing permissions, and account status. Whether you send an invoice, create a subscription, or enroll a trigger, you reference the same billing customer.
Billable Items are the product catalog. Each item has a name, unit price, and currency. The billing type determines where the item can be used: one-off items appear on invoices, recurring items drive subscriptions, and trigger items power condition-driven charges. But they all live in the same catalog and share the same structure.
Revenue is the ledger. Every payment from any source writes a row with the amount, transaction fees, net amount, source type (invoice, subscription, trigger, manual), gateway reference, and status. There is no separate revenue table per billing mode.
Edge supports two payment gateways: Stripe and PayPal. Both work across all billing modes — you can invoice via Stripe, subscribe via PayPal, or mix gateways across different billing customers.
The differentiator is trigger billing. Calendar-driven billing systems ask one question: is it renewal day? Edge asks a second question: has the condition been met? Trigger billing lets you define conditions — usage thresholds, balance limits, event counts, or any measurable metric — and Edge fires the charge when the condition is satisfied. This is not a cron job; it is event-driven billing that reacts to your business logic.
