Usage Metering for Engineers
Hi DevHunt! I'm Peter, founder of OpenMeter. We're building a usage metering platform focused on real-time data problems. Why? AI and DevOps companies need to meter large volumes of usage data. This data has to be accurate for billing and real-time for customer dashboard, messaging, and limit enforcement. Doing both accurate and real-time on scale is challenging. If you provide usage-based pricing, have consumption limits, or need to ensure that cost stays within the margins, OpenMeter eliminates the heavy lifting of implementing: 1. 🚀Scalable Ingestion: Send millions of events per second 2. 🏎️Real-time Meters: Sub-second low latency reads on aggregates 3. 🎯Accurate Meters: For billing with reporting to providers like Stripe 4. 📊Customer Dashboards: Consumer portal and tokens with React hooks 5. ✉️Threshold Messaging: Trigger customer emails or Slack notifications 6. 🚧Avoiding Overages: Real-time usage limit enforcement 7. 🛶Usage Lake: Source of truth for cost and margin analysis. What's our backstory? While working at Stripe, I realized it is challenging to collect and store usage data from all the different components due to the lack of standardization around metering. While having good data quality was critical to working with Finance and Efficiency, collecting, aggregating, and analyzing usage took a lot of time and effort. As APM metrics are not accurate enough (due to sampling, interpolation, and scraping intervals) and expensive to store time series data long term, we decided to launch a stream processing solution. In 2023, we joined YCombinator, and as we started to dig deeper, it became clear that this was just the tip of the iceberg. Companies with usage-based pricing face challenges from engineering to finance, from product to sales. We launched OpenMeter as an Open Source project to change the status quo because we believe standardization is only possible as a community. We want to do this together, with you. What issues have you had with usage metering? I would love to hear your ideas, experiences, and feedback on any and all of the above.
