Seat-based pricing is breaking in the AI era

Your customers' usage is unpredictable. Your inference costs are real. Flat-rate pricing either bleeds your margins or drives your best prospects away. UsageTap gives you the billing infrastructure to charge for value delivered — with guardrails that protect both sides.

No credit card required. Then $0.001 per call.

Fair pricing that scales

Start every customer on free + PAYG — they pay only when they get value. When usage stabilizes, offer committed plans. No forced migrations, no sticker shock.

Ship in hours, not quarters

Built-in pricing plans, customer-facing usage widgets, Stripe sync, and entitlement gating. You get what takes 3–6 months to build internally.

Control inference risk

Quotas, rate limits, anomaly detection, and forecast alerts. Your customers see their spend before the invoice. You see problems before they become churn.

4-step integration

Meter & monetize with a few lines of code

Add begin, check allowed, your LLM call, and update metrics. That's it. Use the SDK hook or plain HTTP, whichever fits your stack.

  1. 1.Call begin
  2. 2.Check allowed
  3. 3.Make your LLM call
  4. 4.Update metrics

Supports LLM calls, tokens, rate-limiting, API calls, searches, audio/video minutes, and custom meter types.

AI prompt kit / reference →

Use the hook to enforce premium entitlements and report usage in one flow.

const usageTap = useUsageTap();

const begin = await usageTap.begin({
  customerId,
  requested: { premium: true },
});

if (!begin.allowed.premium) {
  throw new Error("Premium calls exhausted for this customer");
}

const model = "openai/<model>";
const response = await openai.responses.create({ model, input });

// Model name is illustrative; UsageTap supports multiple providers via your configured AI stack.

await usageTap.end({
  callId: begin.callId,
  model,
  inputTokens: response.usage?.input_tokens ?? 0,
  responseTokens: response.usage?.output_tokens ?? 0,
});

A clear path from free trial to committed plan

Every AI feature costs real money per call. UsageTap lets you offer generous free tiers with hard limits, graduate customers to pay-as-you-go, and introduce committed plans when usage stabilizes — all driven by policy, not code changes.

01

Free tier

20 AI actions/month with hard limits. Zero risk to you, zero cost to them.

02

Pay-as-you-go

Customer pays per action after free allowance. No signup friction, no sticker shock.

03

Usage stabilizes

UsageTap detects predictable patterns and can recommend a committed plan.

04

Committed plan

Lower effective rate with included allowance + PAYG overage. Predictable for both sides.

What you'd build vs. what you get

Building usage-based billing from scratch takes months. UsageTap ships it out of the box.

CapabilityDIYUsageTap
Usage meteringCustom tables & aggregation4 SDK calls
Plan & tier logicCustom upgrade/downgrade flowsDashboard configuration
Stripe integrationWebhooks & reconciliationAutomatic sync
Customer usage UIBuild from scratchDrop-in React widgets
Rate limiting & overagesCustom middlewarePolicy-driven controls
Anomaly detectionStatistical pipelineBuilt-in alerts
Timeline3–6 monthsDays
UsageTap product walkthrough
Product walkthroughAll features →

Risk management

Catch cost surprises before your customers do

Daily and hourly anomaly alerts flag usage that diverges from expected trends. Weekly forecast emails warn customers before they hit limits, with one-click CTAs to upgrade or top up credit.

Anomaly alerts

Notify your ops team when usage spikes or dips beyond forecasted thresholds.

Forecast emails

Help customers adjust behavior and plans before limits are reached.

Weekly customer usage forecast email
Usage anomaly email alert

Capabilities

Entitlements & limits

Plan- or customer-level caps per call, token, and capability—no custom code per tier.

Overage controls

Block, throttle, or bill overage. Switch policies without engineering sprints.

Customer usage widgets

Drop‑in React components for usage vs allowance, forecast charts, and upgrade prompts.

Predictive usage intelligence

Forecast future spend in dollars and API calls—act before overages become churn.

Forecast anomaly detection

Detect actual usage diverging from forecasted expectations using statistical methods.

OpenTelemetry exports

Stream calls, tokens, and cost to any OTLP endpoint—Datadog, Grafana, New Relic.

Free tool

See what your LLM spend will be next month

Upload your OpenAI or Anthropic billing CSV and get an instant forecast with anomaly detection. No signup required.

Try the forecast tool →

As your customers grow

Move beyond static seats without forcing everyone into a new model

AI-powered products don't behave like traditional software. One customer may send a few prompts while another runs thousands of calls overnight. Adaptive Pricing lets you start with PAYG and introduce commitment when usage becomes predictable.

Fair for light users

Let customers begin with free + PAYG so they only pay when they get value. No lock-in to one monetization path.

Protect margins for heavy users

Move stable accounts into committed plans with included allowance and PAYG overage. No forced blanket upgrades.

Give finance predictable spend

Committed tiers work as a savings option. Customers who prefer flexible PAYG stay there.

No forced migration required

Automatic, manual, or no migration at all. You choose the policy that fits your GTM.

We're building the billing layer for AI-native apps

Seat-based pricing worked when marginal costs were near zero. AI changed that. We're working with early adopters to build the infrastructure that replaces it — fair usage pricing with real-time controls. Shape the product with us.