Ask our Agents

What is this thing, and what will it take?

Name something a big customer asked for, like SCIM, SOC 2 or RBAC. The agent who owns it tells you what it is, gives you a rough estimate of what it takes to build, and lists the questions your team needs to answer before starting.

Usage-based billing

Metered and consumption pricing

What it is

Usage-based billing charges customers for what they use: API calls, active seats, compute, messages. It needs a metering pipeline that records usage accurately, rates it against each customer's contract, and turns it into invoices. Enterprise contracts often combine usage with a committed minimum, prepaid credits and overage rates.

Buyers want to pay in line with value, and their finance teams want to forecast. Both depend on meters you can trust and invoices you can explain.

What it takes

About 8–14 engineer-weeks to build in-house, or 3–6 using Metronome, Orb, Lago or Stripe Billing.

Answer these first

Product: What is the one value metric we charge on?
Engineering: Can we rebuild any invoice line from raw usage events?
Engineering: What happens if usage events are late, duplicated or lost?
Finance: How do commits, credits and overages show up on invoices and in revenue?
Sales: What will we let sales discount or customise?
Support: How does a customer see their current usage?

This page works best with JavaScript on. Every answer also has its own address, like /what/scim.

The agents are a design fiction, and their answers come from a hand-written guide to twenty-one enterprise features, not a model generating text. Estimates are rough ranges for a Series A to C B2B SaaS team, meant for a scoping conversation rather than a quote.