Attribution & Finance
Usage-based billing
Charging customers in proportion to what they actually consume — tokens, calls, or compute — instead of a flat fee, seat count, or user-count proxy. It aligns price with cost: because AI cost scales with tokens, usage-based billing is the only pricing that keeps a reseller's margin stable as customers grow.
Example
Instead of billing every tenant $199/month regardless of use, you bill each for the tokens they consumed at your rate. The heavy tenant pays for the load they create; the light tenant pays less and stays happy. Your margin holds either way.
This is a Tokenality concept. See how it works in the product overview or the live playground.
Related terms
Billable tokens
The tokens you actually charge a customer for — as opposed to the tokens you merely consumed. When you resell AI, billable tokens are the input and output tokens attributed to a specific customer of record, rated at your price (your provider cost plus your margin) rather than the raw provider cost.
Revenue leakage
Revenue a business could bill for but doesn't — because of a pricing proxy, an un-billed overage, a dropped metering event, or a missed reconciliation. For AI resellers it's the gap between usage-based cost and proxy-based price; industry estimates put it at 3–9% of revenue for usage-based software.
Metering accuracy
How completely and correctly a system counts the usage it bills. A meter is accurate when every unit of consumption is captured exactly once — idempotently, under load, attributed to the right customer. The maxim: metering accuracy is revenue accuracy — every dropped or double-counted event is money mis-billed.
Credit burndown
Drawing down a customer's prepaid balance as they consume, and recognizing that revenue on burn rather than at purchase. Prepaid credits are deferred revenue when sold; each metered unit of usage converts a slice of that liability into recognized revenue — which is why accurate metering is also an accounting control, not just a billing one.