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Metering, quotas & credits

Metering is how you count what a customer consumes, enforce limits, and — for usage-based plans — price that consumption against prepaid credit.

A monitored asset pairs a product metric with a usage configuration. A metric has a type that decides how it’s aggregated:

  • CumulativeCounter — sums incremental deltas (e.g. API calls).
  • TotalCounter — a running total that’s reset-aware.
  • Gauge — a point-in-time reading (e.g. seats in use).
  • UpDownCounter — signed changes.

Consumption is measured per period (day / week / month / year) against usage tiers. Each tier carries a quota levelNormal, Warning, Critical, OverUsage — and an enforcement policy for when it’s crossed:

PolicyWhat happens
NotifyOnlyAllow, but emit a signal
AllowWithOverageAllow past the limit, track the overage
AllowWithGraceAllow within a grace allowance
RateLimitThrottle
DenyBlock the request
SuspendUsageSuspend the asset

The tiers come from the plan in effect for the customer’s entitlement.

Separately from raw counters, an asset balance is a prepaid credit account — a starting amount in a currency and unit you choose (credits, tokens…), drawn down as usage is consumed. Usage tiers can price that consumption (a base cost plus a per-unit rate), so metered use turns into credits spent — the basis for prepaid and usage-based pricing. Balances support reservations (a short-lived hold before an expensive call), allow overage when you permit it, and can be topped up, withdrawn from, or suspended.

MonetizeIt does the credit accounting — how much value a customer has bought and used — and hands charging to your billing provider (e.g. Stripe), feeding it the usage, overage and lifecycle signals through webhooks so it can issue the invoice or capture the payment.

  • Counts → consumption reported by a session.
  • Capped by → the plan’s tiers.
  • Priced into → credits, feeding your billing.