About aibilling.dev
A fair comparison site for AI billing infrastructure.
Why AI billing is different
Traditional billing systems were built for predictable per-seat costs. You charge $49 per user per month; the cost to serve that user is roughly the same every month. Billing happens at cycle end because nothing meaningful changes in between.
AI inference breaks that model in three specific ways.
Every API call has direct infrastructure cost
When a user sends a request to an AI product, the underlying inference costs $0.10 to $0.50 or more depending on the model. That cost hits before you have collected anything from your customer. You are fronting infrastructure spend in real time, on every request.
Concurrent requests create credit depletion races
When a customer initiates multiple requests simultaneously, you need to know their current balance atomically. A single check determines whether all requests proceed or fail. You cannot collect incrementally. You authorize or block.
Margins change every time you switch models
An AI team switching from GPT-4 to a fine-tuned open-source model might cut its per-request cost by 90%. Traditional billing assumes stable unit economics. AI billing does not have that luxury.
The architectural fork
The market responded by splitting into two distinct architectures. Invoice-based platforms (Orb, Metronome, Lago) capture usage events during the billing period and reconcile them into an invoice at cycle end. Real-time platforms (Credyt, Stigg) authorize and bill usage as it happens; the customer's balance is the source of truth, updated on every request.
Neither architecture is universally better. Invoice-based fits enterprise contracts with quarterly reconciliation and high-volume event throughput. Real-time fits AI products where the lag between a request and a billed charge is itself a financial risk.
Why we built this
aibilling.dev is built and maintained by the team at Credyt, a real-time billing platform for AI products.
AI products introduced a different business model: costs that vary per request, margins tied to model choice, and the risk that a single session can consume significant value before an invoice is generated. Traditional billing systems weren't designed for this. But many tools in the market added “AI billing” to their positioning without changing their underlying architecture.
We found that “AI billing platform” could mean anything from a genuine real-time system with pre-usage authorization to a standard invoice-based metering tool with a new label. That distinction matters. Choosing the wrong architecture means either absorbing real-time infrastructure costs against a month-end invoice, or over-engineering with a real-time platform for a workload that doesn't need it.
We built this site so buyers can understand the true technical differences between billing solutions and how those differences apply to their specific AI use case. Not marketing copy. Architectural trade-offs, honest limitations, and pricing you can actually compare.
Every provider on this site, including Credyt, is evaluated against the same rubric with the same standards. Credyt's limitations are listed honestly. When invoice-based or open-source platforms are the better fit for a given use case, we say so.
We cover real-time, invoice-based, hybrid, subscription-first, open-source, and proprietary platforms.
How we evaluate
Each provider is assessed across 16 dimensions covering billing architecture, usage authorization model, wallet and multi-asset support, payment processing, customer portal, pricing transparency, deployment options, and enterprise contract support.
For pricing, every provider is run through the same canonical scenario: 100 monthly active customers, 500K billing events per month, no enterprise discount, no annual commitment. This makes pricing comparable across platforms that charge per event, per wallet, per transaction, or as a percentage of revenue.
Data packs are refreshed quarterly. Every claim has a source and a date. Entries older than six months trigger a review.
Editorial policy
No provider pays for placement or favorable reviews. Placement order on index pages is alphabetical. Rankings in guides are based on fit for a specific use case, explained explicitly.
All data is sourced and dated. When a provider changes its pricing or features, the relevant pages are updated with a new verification date.
Credyt is included as one provider among many. The same rubric applies. Limitations are listed honestly.
If you find a factual error, contact us at contact@aibilling.dev.