UsageBox records billing-grade usage events, deduplicates retries, handles late events, and produces explainable monthly rollups for the biller you already use.
The difficult part is not drawing an invoice. It is preserving a trustworthy quantity through retries, delays, model changes, and billing-vendor changes.
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.
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.
Payment and billing vendors change. Keeping raw usage and rollups in an independent layer lets you replace downstream billing without re-instrumenting the product.
UsageBox deliberately stops before monetary rating and invoicing. Its job is to make the quantity feeding those systems trustworthy.
Send usage with an Idempotency-Key and retry safely. UsageBox scopes deduplication to your account so transport retries do not become usage.
Meter tokens, API calls, jobs, bytes, seats, or any numeric or unique signal using sum, count, max, and unique-count aggregation.
Backdated and out-of-order events fold into the period where they happened instead of whichever month the collector finally delivered them.
Keep the event that produced each aggregate so usage disputes can be investigated from source data instead of an opaque invoice total.
Read compact per-subscription, per-item, per-meter, per-charge quantities without rescanning every raw event for normal billing workflows.
UsageBox stops at trustworthy quantities. Feed those rollups to Stripe, Lago, your ERP, or your own invoicing code without moving the meter.
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.
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.
Practical writing on metering patterns, AI cost attribution, and what we learn from production billing systems.
September 5, 2026 · 11 min read
The unit you measure and the unit you bill are not the same unit, and collapsing them is what makes AI pricing impossible to change later. What each of the four units really costs to implement, where each one breaks, what outcome pricing actually requires, and the architecture that lets you switch between them without re-instrumenting your product.
Read →September 5, 2026 · 8 min read
Stripe removed usage records in API version 2025-03-31.basil. Pinning to acacia works but freezes you out of everything since. The migration is not a URL swap: usage records were keyed on a subscription item and supported an absolute set action, meter events are keyed on the customer and only aggregate — which makes set a code change, not an integration change.
Read →September 5, 2026 · 9 min read
Adyen closed its acquisition of Orb on 1 July 2026 and runs it under an incubator model, so nothing breaks today. The sentence to read carefully is that multi-PSP support "continues initially". Metronome, Lago, Flexprice, OpenMeter, Amberflo and Chargebee compared, plus how to tell whether you actually need to move.
Read →Free tier. No credit card. Meter first; choose your biller separately.
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