AI products that charge by usage
Track token or request usage per customer, enforce limits with check, and bill overages or draw down prepaid credits.
Skip if:
Your product has a single flat subscription price and no metering.
Last verified
Manage subscriptions, credits and usage-based pricing on top of Stripe with three API calls, from an open-source billing layer for AI startups.
Track token or request usage per customer, enforce limits with check, and bill overages or draw down prepaid credits.
Your product has a single flat subscription price and no metering.
Change plans, add credits, or grandfather customers on old pricing from the dashboard without rewriting billing code.
Your pricing is fixed and you already have stable billing code.
Create custom plans for large customers without building internal dashboards for one-off pricing.
You do not sell negotiated contracts and want a plain checkout page.
Billing is more than taking payments. Teams end up building permission management, metering, and usage limits driven by cron jobs, then wiring all of it to upgrade, downgrade, cancellation and failed-payment states. Race conditions and edge cases in that code cost time. Pricing also changes often, and tying it to application logic means database migrations, rebuilt in-app flows, internal dashboards for custom pricing, and awkward grandfathering of users on old plans. Commercial tools such as Orb and Metronome cover this ground, but they are closed services.
The attach call handles every purchase flow and returns a Stripe Checkout URL or processes an upgrade or downgrade. Check tests access to a product, feature or remaining usage, and track records a usage event.
Build subscriptions, credit systems with top ups, usage-based models with overages, seat-based plans with per-seat limits, and pay-upfront quantities that are used over time.
Set usage limits on a feature, choose when they reset, and charge customers who go over. Your app asks check before allowing an action such as an AI token request.
Products and plans are created on the dashboard, so changing prices or adding a credit system does not need a migration or a rebuilt billing flow in your app.
Autumn takes care of webhooks, upgrades and downgrades, cancellations and failed payments so you do not write that state handling yourself.
Orb is a commercial billing service for usage-based pricing. Autumn covers similar ground for usage limits, credits and overages, but its code is Apache-2.0 and can be self-hosted.
Autumn sits between Stripe and your app, so Stripe still handles payment processing. Pick Autumn if you want to read and run the billing layer yourself. Pick Orb if you want a vendor to operate it and you do not need source access.
Metronome is a paid metering and billing product. Autumn takes a developer-first route: define plans on a dashboard and call attach, check and track from your app.
Autumn's self-hosting depends on several services and the team offers help on Discord. A managed cloud service is available if you prefer not to run it.
Autumn suits AI and usage-based startups that iterate on pricing, want credits and limits without building metering, and value open source code. The paid tools may fit better if you want a fully vendor-run setup.
Self-hosting needs bun installed, plus the backing services Autumn depends on, with an optional Postgres connection string in server/.env.
```bash
git clone https://github.com/useautumn/autumn
bun install
bun dev
```Autumn is licensed under Apache-2.0, according to the GitHub repository metadata.
Yes. Install bun, run bun install, then bun dev, and the dashboard appears on http://localhost:3000. The README notes Autumn depends on several services, and you can point DATABASE_URL in server/.env at your own Postgres instance.
It is listed as an open source alternative to Orb and Metronome, the commercial services for usage-based billing and metering.
No. It is a layer between Stripe and your application. Stripe still processes payments, while Autumn manages pricing models, entitlements and usage on top.
Yes. The README points to a cloud service at app.useautumn.com as the quickest way to start.
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