Best metered-billing tools for AI products, sorted by what the meter actually counts
Metronome, Orb, Lago and Stripe Billing compared for AI products on what the billing unit actually is: a token, a credit, or an event nobody dimensioned for AI.
In short
For AI products, the best metered-billing tool depends on what the meter counts. Orb prices tokens, seats and outcomes in one config. Lago ships an SDK that wraps your LLM client and streams token usage. BuildBase enforces a credit balance synchronously, but the unit is a flat credit, not a token.
Ask Stigg, Orb or any of the other vendors ranking for "AI billing software" what stops a runaway session from blowing through a customer's budget, and the honest answer buried in most of their own posts is: nothing in the billing tool itself. The general version of that gap - metering tells you what happened, enforcement stops what's about to happen - already has its own comparison. This one is narrower: for an AI product specifically, what does the meter actually count? A token, a credit, a seat, or an event nobody bothered to dimension for AI at all?
The one-paragraph answer
If the cost driver is genuinely multi-dimensional - input tokens, output tokens, seats and an outcome-based fee all in the same invoice - Orb is the one built for exactly that shape, with fractional per-token rates as a native pricing primitive. If the product already calls an LLM directly and wants usage pushed to billing with minimal glue code, Lago's Agent SDK wraps that call and streams token counts on its own, on top of a self-hosted edition that costs nothing. Want accurate per-token billing before a request even runs? None of Metronome, Orb or Stripe's Meters API do that natively today. They price and invoice usage; they don't gate it. And if the requirement is a balance that gets checked and decremented before the operation completes, a credit ledger like BuildBase's does that, with an honest caveat: it enforces a number, not specifically a token.
Where each tool's AI story actually differs
Metronome, the one that metered OpenAI before Stripe bought it. Before its acquisition, Metronome was the metering layer behind OpenAI's and Databricks' own billing, which is real pedigree for extreme-scale usage ingestion. Stripe now owns Metronome outright and separately runs its own waitlisted per-token pricing preview inside Stripe Billing (more on that below), so evaluating Metronome today means evaluating two overlapping products from the same company, not one.
Orb, dimensioned for AI specifically. Orb markets itself explicitly around AI billing, and the pitch holds up past the marketing page: it supports fractional, sub-cent per-token rates and names four billing units built for this category - tokens, agent runs, outcomes and credits - combinable in one pricing config. That is a genuinely different shape from a generic per-unit metering engine bolted onto an AI use case after the fact.
Lago, the one with an SDK for your LLM call. Lago's Agent SDK, published for Python and TypeScript, wraps an LLM client and pushes token usage to Lago as it happens, which is a concrete integration convenience none of the others on this list ship. It sits on top of Lago's usual model: the Community edition is open source and free to self-host, with Premium features like dunning and a customer portal sold separately, quote-only.
Stripe Billing, generic today with an AI feature in preview. The base Meters API aggregates usage events for an end-of-cycle invoice and has no AI-specific primitive of its own. Stripe has previewed a feature that auto-syncs per-token pricing for major model providers, but it's waitlist-gated as of this writing, not something every Stripe Billing account can turn on.
Key takeaway
Every vendor here can invoice AI usage accurately. What actually differs is the unit: Orb and Lago's SDK price and track tokens directly, while BuildBase enforces a balance before it's spent but counts a generic credit, not a token. Nobody on this list does both today.
BuildBase's honest limit here
BuildBase's credit module enforces synchronously: consuming credits checks the balance and fails closed, before the calling operation completes, so two concurrent requests can't overdraw the same balance. That part is real and it's the piece missing from Metronome, Orb and Stripe Billing's own descriptions of themselves. But the unit BuildBase enforces is a flat credit, not a token or a specific model's rate. Wiring a token-denominated LLM cost into that ledger means deciding your own conversion rate from tokens to credits, then updating it yourself every time a model's price changes. That upkeep is exactly the line item building usage metering in-house costs you - BuildBase does not track per-model token pricing the way Orb's native units do.
| Feature | BuildBase | Orb |
|---|---|---|
| Native AI billing units | One flat credit unit | Tokens, agent runs, outcomes, credits, combinable |
| Request-time enforcement | Synchronous balance check, fails closed | Meters and invoices; no native pre-request gate |
| Per-token rate tracking | Not built in; convert tokens to credits yourself | Native fractional per-token pricing |
| Pricing | $49/mo flat (Launch), published | Custom quote, no public price list |
| Scope | 20 modules: billing, auth, workspaces, RBAC, one instance | Metering and billing only |
Where Orb wins
If tokens, seats and an outcome fee genuinely need to live in one pricing config, Orb's native support for that shape is a real advantage BuildBase does not match - BuildBase's credit ledger has one dimension, not several combinable ones. For a product whose entire cost structure is multi-input AI usage, that specialization is worth the tradeoff of a quote-only price and a metering-only scope.
How to actually decide
Start with what the invoice actually needs to reflect. Genuinely multi-dimensional AI usage points to Orb - its native units save you from building that pricing logic yourself. If the product already talks to an LLM client directly, Lago's SDK removes a real integration step. And if the whole point is stopping a request before a customer's balance runs out, check for synchronous enforcement specifically: most of the vendors here don't have it, and the ones that do usually don't tie it to a token. Nobody on this list yet does both a token-native unit and pre-request enforcement in the same product; treat that gap as the actual open problem, not a solved one, whichever tool you pick.
A note on sourcing. BuildBase's figures and the credit-enforcement description come from PLANS, PLAN_FACTS and the credits module in packages/shared/src/constants/ plus the credit-balance service in server/src/services/credit/, read today. Metronome's OpenAI and Databricks history, Orb's four AI billing units, Lago's Agent SDK and Stripe's per-token preview all trace to each company's own product pages and announcements, also read today - but none of their dollar pricing appears above as a number, because none of those pricing pages could be reached to re-verify a figure for this edition. This edition still owes a re-verification of Metronome, Orb, Lago Premium and Stripe Billing's current published rates against their own pages once network access allows it, rather than quoting a number nobody checked today.