Did you know that Spreedly tracks a “credit” amount for each subscriber? This internal account is critical to our pro-rating process, but it has a lot of uses beyond that. It’s a great way to give someone a discount on future service when they’re already a subscriber – just go into the UI, add $30 of credit, and it will get automatically applied to the subscriber’s next invoice.

Until now you’ve only been able to add credit via the UI, but we just rolled out the ability to add a credit via the API. This opens up a whole new set of possibilities, as now you can implement automated incentives and rewards for your subscribers. A few ideas:

• Hook it into an affiliate system and automatically give subscribers store credit when they sign up a friend.
• Hand out coupon codes and put a box on your account page that lets a subscriber apply a code and get a credit. Spreedly will support this in-system eventually, but why wait on us?
• If you have a system outage (oops!) write a little job that gives everyone affected a $5 credit. That’s the sort of service that turns customers into fanatics.

What other ideas do you have for leveraging the Add Credit API?