Inspiration
Traditional subscription pricing doesn't work for everyone. Light users often end up overpaying, while merchants lose customers due to inflexible plans. We wanted to build a solution that makes pricing adaptive to actual usage without requiring businesses to replace their existing billing systems.
What it does
FlexPrice AI is a plug-and-play pricing advisor and adaptive billing framework. It analyses customer usage, compares fixed, annual, usage-based and hybrid plans, and recommends the most suitable option. Customers can interact with an AI-powered advisor to understand their options, while merchants can explore pricing strategies. PayPal handles checkout, renewals and usage-based payments.
How we built it
We built a deterministic pricing engine that forecasts usage, calculates the cost of different plans and recommends the best fit. We integrated Claude for conversational assistance and pricing explanations, ensuring all monetary calculations remain deterministic. PayPal Orders, Vault and Webhooks power the payment and billing lifecycle. A lightweight adapter framework allows merchants to integrate FlexPrice AI with their existing backends.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was designing a flexible integration that works across different merchant backends without disrupting their existing systems. We also had to ensure pricing accuracy, secure payment processing, reliable renewals and protection against duplicate transactions. Separating AI-generated explanations from actual pricing decisions was another important design consideration.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We built a unified framework combining pricing intelligence, conversational AI and PayPal-powered adaptive billing. We're particularly proud of the plug-and-play adapter architecture and deterministic pricing engine, which keeps financial decisions reliable while making AI genuinely useful to both customers and merchants.
What we learned
We learned how to integrate LLMs into financial workflows while maintaining deterministic and auditable business logic. We also gained practical experience with PayPal's payment infrastructure, webhook-driven workflows, subscription billing and designing extensible systems that can integrate with different merchant platforms.
What's next for FlexPrice AI
We plan to introduce trained ML models for more accurate usage forecasting and churn prediction, improve pricing recommendations using real-world customer behaviour, and expand merchant integrations. We also aim to scale the platform using event-driven infrastructure and support more flexible billing models across different industries.
Built With
- anthropic-claude-api
- api-integration
- css3
- event-driven-architecture
- express.js
- generative-ai
- html5
- javascript
- llm
- node.js
- oauth-2.0
- payment-gateway-integration
- paypal-javascript-sdk
- paypal-orders-api
- paypal-rest-api
- paypal-vault-api
- paypal-webhooks
- playwright
- pricing-engine
- rest-api
- sdk-development
- subscription-billing
- usage-based-billing
- web-components
