Free architecture selector
Meter, billing platform, or both?
Answer five boundary questions. The result recommends an architecture class—not whichever vendor has the longest feature list this quarter.
- Who owns pricing and credits?
- Who creates the invoice?
- Do you already have a biller?
- Must usage stay portable?
- Is self-hosting non-negotiable?
Architecture questions
What actually has to live in the same system?
Architecture fit
Independent usage metering layer
You already have the financial layer and want usage evidence to survive billing-provider changes. A dedicated meter fits this boundary: ingest, dedupe, retain raw events and roll up quantities; let the existing biller rate and invoice them.
This is an architecture selector, not a vendor ranking. It deliberately asks where metering should stop. Product features, pricing and ownership change faster than this boundary.
The important boundary is quantity vs money
A meter answers what happened and how much. A billing platform can additionally answer what that quantity costs, what contract applies, and what appears on the invoice.