Why Paygentic Exists
Software economics changed. Fixed monthly subscriptions break when your costs vary per request. When running GPT-4 costs 20/month regardless of usage creates unsustainable unit economics. The technical challenges multiply: Metering at Scale Tracking millions of events per second — tokens processed, queries executed, bytes stored — without impacting application performance. Pricing Flexibility Supporting per-token, per-query, per-gigabyte, and hybrid models simultaneously across different customer segments, with both upfront and usage-based charges in the same plan. Payment Collection Collecting upfront fees before a subscription activates, then billing metered usage at period end — all through a single integration. Subscription Lifecycle Managing activations, renewals, upgrades, and cancellations with correct proration and invoicing at every transition.Architecture Philosophy
Paygentic unifies metering, pricing, invoicing, and payments into a single pipeline. You define what to measure, how to price it, and when to bill — Paygentic handles the rest. This design eliminates entire categories of problems:- No reconciliation between usage logs and billing records
- No separate integration points for metering vs invoicing vs payments
- No manual invoice generation or payment chasing
- No custom logic to gate activation on upfront payment
Core Primitives
Products & Metrics Define services and measurable units. An LLM service tracks input tokens, output tokens, and fine-tuning hours as distinct billable metrics. Plans & Prices Package pricing strategies. Standard rates, dynamic pricing, or percentage fees — each with a payment term (in_advance for upfront charges, in_arrears for metered usage). Plans bundle prices into subscribable offerings with a billing interval and currency.
Subscriptions & Invoices
Connect customers to plans. When a subscription includes upfront charges, Paygentic generates an initial invoice that must be paid before the subscription activates. Subsequent invoices are generated automatically at each billing period.
Meter Events
Report consumption as it occurs. Each event carries a customer ID, metric, and quantity. Events are fire-and-forget — always 202 Accepted — and Paygentic aggregates them for invoicing at period end.
Features & Entitlements
Grant access to capabilities through your pricing. Attach entitlements to prices with quota limits, reset periods, and rollover behavior. When a customer subscribes, entitlements are provisioned automatically.
Implementation Patterns
AI Services- Input/output token differentiation
- Model-specific pricing tiers
- Platform access fees (in advance) plus token usage (in arrears)
- Fine-tuning compute billing
- Storage per GB-month
- Query compute seconds
- Egress bandwidth charges
- Reserved vs on-demand pricing
- Build minutes
- Deployment slots
- Bandwidth consumption
- Concurrent execution limits
Technical Integration
Single API surface. Define your monetization model programmatically:- Create products and billable metrics
- Configure prices and plans
- Onboard customers and create subscriptions
- Report meter events
- Invoices are generated and collected automatically