SaaS Usage Metering & Quotas. @usage-metering

The moment pricing touches usage — API calls, seats, storage, credits, AI tokens — your product needs metering it can defend. Undercount and you leak revenue; overcount and you burn trust with a customer holding a spreadsheet that disagrees with your invoice. The SaaS Usage Metering & Quotas sprint builds the pipeline that gets the number right: capture, aggregation, enforcement, and the customer-facing view of it.

The finish state is usage as infrastructure: events captured accurately at the source, aggregated into meters both billing and product read, limits enforced in real time with grace behaviour you chose, and customers seeing their own consumption before the invoice does.

Usage Event Pipeline

Usage captured at the source with idempotency and durability — so retries, race conditions, and outages do not corrupt the count anyone gets billed on.

Metering & Aggregation

Events rolled into per-tenant meters over billing periods — with late events, corrections, and audit lineage from any total back to its raw events.

Quotas & Limits

Real-time enforcement at the edges of your product: hard stops, soft warnings, overage allowances, and grace periods — each behaviour a policy choice, not an accident.

Commercial Rules

The pricing logic on top — tiers, credits, prepaid packs, overage rates — feeding your billing system, plus the in-product usage dashboard your customers check.

1. Scope — Fix the billable metrics, the enforcement points, the quota behaviours, and the accuracy requirements.
2. Build — Land the event pipeline and meters, verify counts against known traffic, then wire enforcement and commercial rules.
3. Handover — Reconciliation report proving accuracy, dashboards live for customers and finance, and the meter configuration handed over.

The SaaS Usage Metering & Quotas is a menu item on the Scrums.com delivery catalog, available at every plan tier. Add it to your plan backlog and your delivery team schedules it like any other item — scoped, tracked, and reported through the SEOP. See Delivery Plan Tiers.

How accurate does the metering actually get?

Accurate enough to bill on: idempotent capture, durable delivery, and a reconciliation path from every aggregate to its raw events. The accuracy requirement is set in scoping and proven in the handover report.

Does this include the billing system itself?

No — it feeds one. Meters emit into your subscription machinery; if that layer needs building too, the SaaS Billing & Subscription System is the companion item and the two are often scheduled together.

Can limits apply to AI or API consumption?

Yes — token, request, and compute-style meters are the growing case. The same pipeline meters them, and quota enforcement at the API edge is part of the build.