Aeion Billing for Usage-Based Metered Billing
Per-seat pricing is collapsing. Modern SaaS bills on consumption — per API call, per GB transferred, per active user, per AI token, per workflow execution. Dedicated metering vendors (Metronome $50-150K/year, Lago $20-100K/year, OpenMeter, Orb) charge a tax on every metered event. Aeion Billing today enforces a hard usage limit per plan tier natively — a record count checked in real time against the tenant's license, with the operation blocked once it's reached. Consumption-based overage metering and invoicing (tiered/graduated pricing on top of raw usage) is not yet a built-in billing engine — see below for exactly what's live versus what you'd need to build. Walkthroughs for API platforms, infrastructure SaaS, AI products describe target-state usage models and call out which parts run on Aeion today.
What Usage-Based Billing Demands
What's live today: each module license carries a limits map (e.g. maxProducts, apiCallsPerMonth, storageGb, or any custom key) set per plan tier. On the relevant create operation, Aeion checks the tenant's current count against that limit in real time and hard-blocks the operation with an upgrade prompt once the ceiling is reached — there's no separate warning tier today; a limit is either not reached (allowed) or reached (blocked). If a module has no limit configured, usage is unrestricted, and if no license is found the check fails open rather than blocking a tenant that isn't licensed yet.
Walkthrough — API Platform
Scenario: An API platform with pay-per-call pricing, 50K customers, and 5B API calls/month, running Aeion Billing + AI + auto-CRUD with per-customer rate limits and quotas and tier-based overage pricing.
Walkthrough — Infrastructure SaaS (Storage / Compute)
Scenario: An infrastructure SaaS company billing per-GB storage and per-hour compute, with 5,000 customers at petabyte scale, running Aeion Billing + Files + auto-CRUD with metered storage and compute per customer.
Walkthrough — AI Product Token-Based
Scenario: An AI product billing on tokens across LLM, image, and voice usage per customer, running Aeion Billing + AI + AeionClaw with per-call provider-cost tracking and a customer markup.
FAQ
Not today. What's live is a hard usage limit per license — a count checked in real time on the relevant create operation and blocked once it hits the configured ceiling. A full event-level metering pipeline (per-event capture, dedup keys, aggregation windows, a live usage dashboard) isn't a built-in Aeion Billing engine yet; see the tech-specs page for the exact current behavior of the limit enforcer.
Yes, in the sense that a license's configured limit is hard-enforced — once a tenant hits it, the operation is blocked with an upgrade message. There's no separate spend-cap concept or auto-unblock-on-payment flow layered on top of that today.
Not natively yet. Aeion Billing's usage-related capability today is binary per-tier limit enforcement, not a configurable pricing-model engine. Multi-provider payment processing, invoicing, and proration for plan changes are separate, real capabilities you can combine with your own pricing logic.
Not as a built-in feature. There's no commit-minimum-revenue tracking or overage-billing engine in Aeion Billing today.
Tax on any invoice — usage-related or not — is calculated per customer and jurisdiction through the Aeion Tax integration.
Those are dedicated metering vendors solving a problem Aeion Billing doesn't fully solve yet. If your pricing model requires true consumption-based overage billing, budget for one of them (or a custom build) alongside Aeion Billing's payment processing and invoicing rather than expecting Aeion to replace them outright today.