AI-based products introduce new billing challenges. Whether selling token usage, inference time, or API calls, providers must manage metering, prepaid credits, invoicing, and payments — all while ensuring flexibility and scale. Traditionally, implementing this required custom logic, manual reconciliation, and duct-taped integrations.
Not anymore.
Introducing Kill Bill + Aviate
Kill Bill, the leading open-source billing platform, already provides rich support for catalogs, subscriptions, usage plans, and automated invoicing. Aviate, our new companion product, extends this with:
- Scalable Metering APIs to track usage events (like AI input tokens).
- Wallet and Credit Pools for prepaid or postpaid consumption.
- Advanced Plan and Catalog Management integrated directly with Kill Bill.
Together, they offer a complete billing solution tailored for AI and other usage-based models.
AI Billing in Action
In our AI Usage Tutorial, we demonstrate a full example:
Step 1 — Define Pricing and Metering
- Create a Billing Meter to track AI input tokens.
- Create a Plan in Kill Bill, linked to this meter, defining:
- Monthly billing
- Tier pricing ($2 per million tokens)
Step 2 — Setup Customer and Wallet
- Create a Kill Bill Account and a subscription on the usage plan.
- Setup a Wallet in Aviate with prepaid credits and automatic top-off logic:
- Initial credit of $10
- Auto refill to $10 when balance falls below $5
- Credit expiration support
Step 3 — Record AI Usage
- As users consume tokens, record usage via Aviate’s metering API.
- Aviate aggregates usage for invoicing.
Step 4 — Invoice and Collect Payment
- Trigger Kill Bill’s invoice run to generate invoices based on usage.
- Process payments and handle payment failures gracefully.
- Wallet credits activate upon successful payment, enforcing prepaid logic.
Leverage our Aviate UI
The configuration of catalog entries can also be achieved through the Aviate UI as shown below:
Why This Matters
This end-to-end flow shows how you can:
- Monetize AI products without building billing infrastructure from scratch.
- Leverage Aviate for complex usage scenarios, fine-grained catalog management, wallet functionality and metering system
- Leverage open-source Kill Bill for subscription management, invoicing and payments
Check-out our Aviate offerings here.
