October 20, 2026 · 11 min read
Codex vs Claude Code 2026: Usage Limits & Cost per Plan
Codex vs Claude Code, October 2026: what $20, $100 and $200 buy, five-hour and weekly limits, which one runs out first, and the API cost after it does.
Read →Built for AI productsOwn your usage meter.
Own your usage meter.
Keep billing portable.
Without re-instrumenting your product.
UsageBox records billing-grade usage events, deduplicates retries, handles late events, and produces explainable monthly rollups for the biller you already use.
Idempotent
Ingestion
Raw events
Retained
Late events
Event-time aware
POST /api/v1/usage
curl -X POST https://api.usagebox.com/api/v1/usage \
-H "x-api-key: $UBX_KEY" \
-H "Idempotency-Key: req_8x42jk" \
-d '[{
"meter": "meter.llm-tokens-in",
"value": 12450,
"timestamp": "2026-05-16T18:42:11Z"
}]'
# value is the only required field.
# Send Idempotency-Key and retries are safe.
# Rolls up per meter. Bill it downstream anywhere.
Why usage metering deserves its own layer
The difficult part is not drawing an invoice. It is preserving a trustworthy quantity through retries, delays, model changes, and billing-vendor changes.
Retries are normal
Collectors and application servers retry. A billing-grade meter has to make at-least-once delivery safe rather than turning network behavior into extra usage.
Usage arrives late
Queues stall, workers reconnect, and batch jobs report after the fact. Event time and ingest time are different facts, and billing needs to preserve both.
Your meter should outlive your biller
Payment and billing vendors change. Keeping raw usage and rollups in an independent layer lets you replace downstream billing without re-instrumenting the product.
Start from the metering problem you have
Same ingestion contract, different buyer jobs. These pages show how the usage layer fits AI cost, MCP, Stripe and general API metering without pretending one billing model fits all of them.
The metering primitives you need before billing
UsageBox deliberately stops before monetary rating and invoicing. Its job is to make the quantity feeding those systems trustworthy.
Idempotent Ingestion
Send usage with an Idempotency-Key and retry safely. UsageBox scopes deduplication to your account so transport retries do not become usage.
Flexible Metering
Meter tokens, API calls, jobs, bytes, seats, or any numeric or unique signal using sum, count, max, and unique-count aggregation.
Late Events
Backdated and out-of-order events fold into the period where they happened instead of whichever month the collector finally delivered them.
Raw Event History
Keep the event that produced each aggregate so usage disputes can be investigated from source data instead of an opaque invoice total.
Monthly Rollups
Read compact per-subscription, per-item, per-meter, per-charge quantities without rescanning every raw event for normal billing workflows.
Biller Independent
UsageBox stops at trustworthy quantities. Feed those rollups to Stripe, Lago, your ERP, or your own invoicing code without moving the meter.
The next storage engine is open source
usagedb is the Apache-2.0 Rust storage engine being developed for UsageBox. Production UsageBox currently keeps Firestore authoritative while usagedb runs as a shadow path until equivalence and recovery requirements are proven.
Read the engine as it develops, fork it, and follow the design decisions around ingestion, deduplication and rollups. The production boundary is intentionally explicit: usagedb is not yet the authoritative UsageBox store.
pbudzik/usagedb
Or read the architecture overview in our usagedb article, then go deep with the 10-part engine internals series: ingest, dedupe, columnar segments, rollups, the query engine, and how it is tested.
Notes on AI billing
Practical writing on metering patterns, AI cost attribution, and what we learn from production billing systems.
October 20, 2026 · 10 min read
Google Antigravity Pricing 2026: Limits, Free to Ultra
Google Antigravity pricing, October 2026: the free weekly quota, AI Pro at $19.99 with Gemini 4 Argon, the Ultra plans, quota refresh and AI credit overages.
Read →October 20, 2026 · 9 min read
DeepSeek API Pricing 2026: V4.1 Flash, V4 Pro, Off-Peak
DeepSeek API pricing, October 2026: V4.1 Flash and V4 Pro per million tokens, peak vs off-peak hours, cache hits, and the $0.75 per 1,000 Search and Fetch fee.
Read →Start metering AI usage in 5 minutes
Free tier. No credit card. Meter first; choose your biller separately.