Solutions / By need
Meter usage and sell credits, not just seats
Per-seat pricing does not fit AI and API products. Meter per action, enforce quotas and overage, and meter even disconnected machines — with no double-counting.
The challenge
AI, API and automation products are billed by consumption — tokens, calls, jobs, minutes — not by seats. That needs accurate metering, monthly allowances, overage handling and a ledger you can trust for billing, all while staying correct under concurrency and across multiple app instances.
It also has to work where the network does not: edge and air-gapped deployments still need to consume against a budget and reconcile later. Getting this wrong means overcharging customers or leaking revenue.
How Delta1 Labs helps
A layered approach
Price by action
Define a cost table mapping each action to a credit cost. The SDK meters consumption against a credit pool with idempotency keys, so a retried call is never charged twice.
Enforce budgets
Monthly allowances with hard-stop, soft or auto-top-up overage policies, plus low-balance and exhaustion events you can act on.
Meter offline
Issue a signed credit block a disconnected machine spends locally, then reconcile the actual consumption when it reconnects — no connectivity required at spend time.
Capabilities
What you get
- Per-action cost table
- Map actions to costs; change pricing without shipping a new build.
- Credit pools & immutable ledger
- Every grant and deduct is an append-only ledger entry.
- Quotas & overage policies
- Monthly allowances with hard-stop, soft, or auto-top-up.
- Air-gapped credit blocks
- Signed offline budgets that spend and reconcile without a network.
- Threshold & webhook events
- Low-balance and exhaustion events delivered to your systems.
- Concurrency-safe
- Serializable check-and-deduct — no double-spend across instances.
Built with
Outcomes
- Bill by real consumption, not seats.
- No double-charging under retries or concurrency.
- Disconnected machines still meter and reconcile.
- Change pricing without a new release.
Frequently asked
Questions, answered
How do you prevent double-charging?
Deducts are idempotent (keyed) and run in serializable transactions with retry, so a retried request or two concurrent app nodes can never spend the same credits twice.
Can I meter machines with no internet?
Yes. You issue a signed credit block the machine spends offline against a local budget, then reconcile the actual usage when it reconnects.
Can I combine seats and credits?
Yes — a product can carry both seat entitlements and credit pools, so you can sell a seat that includes a monthly credit allowance.
Let's talk about your setup
Tell us what you're building — we'll help you protect, license and ship it, managed or self-hosted.