Metering and Billing: What They Are and How They Work

Metering measures product consumption through durable, identifiable usage events, while billing applies pricing rules to aggregated usage and produces invoices and financial records. A reliable end-to-end system separates ingestion, aggregation, rating, invoicing, and reconciliation, with stable event identities, deduplication, shared window and time-zone definitions, versioned pricing, and traceability from invoice lines back to source events. Common errors such as duplicate or missing events, late arrivals, inconsistent aggregation, and stale rate cards can produce incorrect charges even when downstream calculations function as designed, making reconciliation and observability essential. AI products add complexity because a single request can involve models, tools, vector stores, compute, and multiple possible commercial units such as tokens, requests, agent actions, compute time, or credits; credit systems also require ledger-backed state for grants, debits, expirations, and concurrent spending. The passage distinguishes measurement and financial processing from request-time enforcement, which must make low-latency decisions using current entitlements, balances, and limits to allow, deny, or flag new workloads. It presents Stigg as a modular platform for metering, entitlements, credits, runtime enforcement, and billing integrations, including deployment options intended for enterprise and regulated environments.

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