How do you manage client 3rd party service payments?

Jobs / Freelance
1

Hello folks,

So I’m curious how freelancers/agencies tend to manage accounts and billing third party services that clients require for their apps e.g OpenAI, SERP APIs, AWS/GCP etc.

The approach I tend to do is:

Get client to create admin email account on their domain (or I do it for them) e.g accounts@clientdomain.com

Any accounts for that client are created under that email

Client adds their own payment method to the account

It’s not the most straightforward method but I can’t think of a better way off the top of my head. For some clients I put all the client bills on one card and forward the invoice at the end of the month, but I’m just wondering if anyone has any other solutions or methods they use?

2

We used to try and do it for them. But it was a hassle

Made some docs and now make them set up an account.

The exception is a Google maps API key.

Unless a start-up is heavy on Google maps use, we tend to just use our own (restricted to their domain)

Google maps free credits are plenty for the occasional address lookup and searchbox

Thanks
Zubair

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