Billing based on traffic

[Inity]

Hello. I need to do prepaid billing based on bandwidth/traffic allowance, without concern for time. I want to users to pay like pay-as-you-go telephone service, where they pay something like $10 and get 10GB of data transfer to use whenever they want.

Is this possible? Would it need to be custom made?

[alan]

Yes, FirstSpot can do that. Here are the suggested steps:

1) Create Plan with Total Data Transfer Quota of 10GB

2) Use Bulk Account with this newly created Plan to pre-create a group of username/password (or scratch code)

3) When you collect payment (via method external to FirstSpot), you can simply hand out a username/password (or scratch code)
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~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[Inity]

Okay, that sounds good. I have a couple more questions.

1. Is it also possible to use scratch codes like this for a customer to add an extra 10GB to an existing account, for rotating customers who don't use PayPal/Credit Card, so they can keep the same account?

2. Is it possible to get custom features added to this software to use it as the back end for an ISP, where some customers are hotspot providers and get extra credit whenever other customers access the network via the hotspot?

For example; customer "A" signs up to the ISP and gets a modem and router (maybe needing specific custom firmware?) to be a hotspot provider for himself and other customers. Customer "A" then gets extra credit on their account based on how much data customers "B" and "C" transfer when accessing the network over the hotspot provided by customer "A". Because all of their accounts are with the ISP and this software is on the backend with the ISP, all three customers could also access the network elsewhere from another hotspot provider who is also signed up to the network. Is this possible?

[alan]

1) Yes. For the suggestion above, actually our credit card module is not used. You can either top-up the account manually in Configuration Manager -> Users or programmatically via FirstSpot API (see chapter 10 of firstspot_guide.pdf)

2) FirstSpot is pretty open and you can always access the user information and user log via ODBC table or FirstSpot API. Refer to chapter 5 & 10 of firstspot_guide.pdf for more information.

If you want us to perform the actual customization for you, please send us an email to firstspot@patronsoft.com to discuss.
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~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[Inity]

Thanks!