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Comment by epberry | Hacker News Reader

Usage based billing is not only hard to implement but hard to consume. No one really knows what they are spending and how much particular customers or products cost. I did a writeup a week ago on CDNs and ended up spending several hours in spreadsheets.

I had felt this pain vaguely before but actually seeing it everyday at my current job makes me realize there are engineers suffering on both sides of software billing.

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Stripe offers simple metering, but in the end, you make the job of calculating metering charges (aggregate all usage and send the value to stripe). It’s becoming harder when you are an API or a cloud company who want to bill a server usage for instance. Calculations are getting heavy, costful and hard to maintain. This is why I do think stripe is not a usage based solution, and also the reason why I decided to create a company trying to solve this pain :)

This.

Usage-based billing is incomplete without its suite of reporting, consolidation and visualization tools. No wonders there is a cottage industry of cloud computing consultants and SaaS solutions focused on helping you to make sense of your AWS/GCP/Azure invoices.

Speaking of usage-based billing, if I intend to charge users a usage-based bill at the end of the month, as far as I have looked Stripe is the only provider that supports this (they call it "metered billing"), is there really no alternative?

The OG poster website is actually a Stripe alternative. They also call out Chargebee which is another alternative that should support this.

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