| name | implement-metered-billing |
| description | Implement usage-based / metered billing correctly — idempotent usage recording, aggregation & rating to billable quantities, on-time usage reporting before invoice close, and counted-vs-billed reconciliation. Use when billing on API calls, seats used, GB, events, or any consumption metric. |
Skill: Implement Metered Billing
Usage-based billing is a metering problem before it is a billing problem. Revenue is silently lost when usage is under-counted and clawed back when over-counted. This skill builds the counting → rating → reporting → reconciliation path so billed usage equals real usage.
When to use
- Billing on consumption (API calls, compute, storage, messages, events) or metered seats.
- Adding overage to a base plan (hybrid model).
- Diagnosing a discrepancy between what you counted and what the provider invoiced.
Steps
- Define the meter precisely. What single unit is billable, at what granularity, with what rounding, over what window (aligned to the billing period)? Ambiguity here becomes a billing dispute.
- Record usage idempotently. Every usage event carries a stable, caller-supplied event key; dedupe on it so retries/at-least-once producers can't double-count. Store raw events before aggregation so you can re-derive.
- Aggregate and rate. Roll raw events to billable quantity per subscription per period; apply the rating rules (tiers, included allowance, overage price). Keep aggregation deterministic and replayable from raw events.
- Report before invoice close. Push usage to the provider (or generate the invoice line) before the billing period closes, respecting the provider's cutoff. Late usage either misses the invoice or triggers a correction — decide which on purpose.
- Reconcile counted-vs-billed. A scheduled job compares your aggregated quantity to what the provider billed and alerts on drift. This is the safety net that catches dropped or duplicated usage. See
../../knowledge/webhooks-idempotency-and-revrec.md.
- Handle backfills and corrections explicitly. When late/corrected usage arrives after close, apply it as an adjustment on the next invoice, not a silent mutation of a closed period.
Anti-patterns
- Recording usage without an idempotency key, so a producer retry double-bills.
- Aggregating destructively (no raw events) so you can't re-derive or reconcile.
- Reporting usage after the provider's cutoff and losing it silently.
- No counted-vs-billed reconciliation — drift is invisible until a customer disputes.
- Mutating a closed billing period instead of issuing an adjustment.
Output
A metering implementation: meter definition → idempotent recording → deterministic aggregation/rating → on-time reporting → reconciliation job + drift alert → backfill/correction policy. Prove it with duplicate- and out-of-order-delivery fixtures.
