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Random idea:

Don't build a billing system. Or at least not a precise one.

Have a price list as normal, but just guestimate the user's bills based on any easily accessible information. Eg. For a hosting company I might just count how many VM's they have active when the billing script runs . If the user isn't happy with the total, give them a button to correct the total and pay that.

Spot check what the user's pay, and warn then ban any users which are clearly deliberately paying substantially less than list price for your services.




This sounds like trouble at several levels.

Someone's going to reverse engineer your heuristic and min-max it. At that point, you'll need to defend your heuristic against edge cases. And then you may as well just make it official.

Also, B2B customers are allergic to "pay what you feel"-type schemes.


I love it, sounds like the Swedish shops with no cashier https://mashable.com/article/swedish-store-cashiers Has it been tried before? How were disputes managed?


How does auditing work if billing is non-deterministic?


This is a great way to be bankrupted by crypto currency miners.


You’d still have to apply the right tax rate for every line item. If you allow the user to edit the total, then which of the tax amounts are you going to recalculate?




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