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Billing mechanics

Metered billing

Collecting usage events during a period and rating them into invoice lines when the period closes.

Metered billing is the mechanism under usage-based pricing: ingest events, aggregate them against a meter, rate the total, and put the result on an invoice.

The hard parts are all about time and trust. Events arrive late. Events arrive twice. A customer disputes a figure six weeks later and you need to show which events made it up. A meter’s aggregation cannot change mid-period without changing what the customer was told they were buying.

The practical requirements are idempotent ingestion, a defined late-arrival window, aggregation fixed at meter definition, and the ability to show a customer the events behind any line on any invoice.

Related terms

  • Usage-based pricing Charging by what the customer consumes rather than by a fixed subscription fee. Also called consumption or metered pricing.
  • Meter The definition of what is measured and how it aggregates: which events count, over what period, summed or maximum or counted.
  • Overage Usage beyond an included allowance or commitment, charged at a separate rate.
  • Billing cycle The recurring period a subscription is invoiced for, and the run that generates those invoices.