Feature Request: Usage-Based Billing Integration

For me this would be pretty important. Also it should be possible to manually override the “reported usage” e.g. at polar everything works via those events. But maybe my Application tracks the usage itself and reports it at the end of the month/billing period.

That's one of the reasons I currently prefers pad*l before polar. BC polar makes it hard to revision usage or correct usage when events wrongly committed. So one Endpoint would be great where the entire usage of current period can be overwritten. :)

This is crucial for us to adopt Creem and for a number of AI SaaS companies that have a “Pay as you Go/Usage” tier as their base tier or only tier as they charge on AI token usage.

• This is also crucial for the Hybrid Subscription + PAYG model where the user PAYG’s for usage over the included subscription.
  
  

• The PAYG solution needs to be an upfront payment that triggers on a user defined threshold and tops up for a user defined amount, the upfront payment is crucial to remove the risk of non payment.
  
  

• Likewise the hybrid subscription with PAYG would also have a credit pool that triggers on a threshold and the unused credit would carry over to the following billing periods.
  
  

• Also the option to age out unused credits in stages ie after 3 months drops to 75% 6 months 50% 9 months 25% 12 months 0% this is to remove bad debt from your books inline with you terms and conditions

  • to be clear this is relative to the original amount not the current amount of the payment being aged out, i.e. if a customer buys $100 in credit and at 3 months they have $80 the reduction is to 75% of $100 or $75 not 75% of $80 or $60
    

  • For this the customers payments would need to be dated and consumption tracked and the usage taken from the oldest.

• Lastly on this with subscriptions that include a set amount of credit the ability to roll over unused credit into following billing periods and age out

How Usage-Based Billing Could Work f out most use cases in Creem

Usage-based billing should be structured around two key concepts: events and meters.

Events

Events represent individual actions performed by users. These might include:

video_streamed

asset_uploaded

ai_task_executed

ai_tokens_ingested

Each event would be sent to Creem, carrying metadata like:

user_id

timestamp

quantity or size (e.g., GB, minutes, tasks)

Custom properties (e.g., region, type)

Meters

Meters define how these events are aggregated over time. For example:

A meter called streaming_minutes could sum the duration of video_streamed events monthly.

Another meter, storage_used, could track peak or average storage consumption from asset_uploaded events.

Each meter could include:

Source event: e.g., ai_task_executed

Aggregation method: sum, max, count, unique, etc.

Reset interval: monthly, daily, hourly

Billing Logic

With this setup, we could:

1. Track usage in real time by recording and aggregating events through meters.

2. Apply pricing rules like:

First 1,000 AI tasks free, then $0.02 per task and $0.10 per GB uploaded beyond 5 GB/month

3. Generate invoices automatically at the end of each billing cycle.

nice to have!