One benefit of 21's API billing model is lower transaction fees. If the dev only uses $2 of API fees, using a service like Stripe would eat up 18% of the income.

Another benefit is that when you do net-30 usage based billing, you always have to be concerned that the card might be maxed out or invalid by the time the bill gets charged. With 21, you can be sure that the bill will get paid since the Bitcoin is locked up in escrow until the transaction is processed.

You could always have them pay up front, which is what pretty much all telephony services like Twilio do, as fraud is high in that market. You could even have them pay up front with Bitcoin to avoid the CC fees.

Good point. Wasn't thinking about fees. Thanks.

With Bitcoin and 21 you can set up payments within hours, if not minutes.

If you wanted to set up a traditional CC, you'd need to write the whole billing and tracking system, and so on. Managing all this is cost-prohibitive for smaller solutions.

Oh, and with CCs there are chargebacks, so you can never be sure that the money will actually arrive on your account. This virtually rules out any kinds of services where it costs you real money to run. E.g. if you want to create mechanical-turk API, good luck. Someone will pay with a stolen CC, ramp up $10k in bills, and then do a chargeback.

Come on now. I specifically mention via Stripe, so suggesting a developer would have to write a billing and tracking system is a bit analogous to someone saying Stripe is better than 21 because a dev would have to write the whole of what 21 provides. Stripe is awfully quick to setup in many cases.

That said, your point about chargebacks is certainly a good one.

It's not so hard with gateways like braintree or stripe actually. If you have the experience, you can do it in hours / minutes. The other part is fraud prevention, which IMO is a more complicated problem per se.