Consumption Billing is Eating SaaS

Consumption billing has been the future of SaaS for a decade. AI just made it the present.

Why now?

AI workloads are inherently variable. A single user can consume 100x more compute on Tuesday than Monday. Fixed subscriptions can't capture this variance — and they shouldn't try.

The infrastructure gap

Most billing systems were built for recurring subscriptions, not metered usage at scale. Rating engines, aggregation pipelines, and invoice generation for consumption models require different architecture.

Building for consumption

Start with metering. You can't bill for what you can't measure. Instrument every meaningful unit of value delivery — tokens, API calls, compute seconds, or business outcomes.