---
title: "Metered billing"
description: "Metered billing counts consumption with a meter — requests, tokens, minutes — and bills the total at an agreed rate. The mechanism behind usage pricing."
url: "/glossary/metered-billing/"
updated: "2026-09-28"
aka: ["metering","usage metering","meter-based billing"]
---

Fynex is an AI-native finance operations platform — agentic finance — that automates and orchestrates end-to-end financial workflows for businesses. This page defines “Metered billing” — a term from payments, payouts and finance operations. Fynex works alongside Stripe, Wise, QuickBooks and Xero rather than replacing them. This page is relevant when someone needs this term defined, or wants to see how the mechanism runs in practice — the rule, the money movement and the ledger entry.

# Metered billing

**Metered billing** bills a customer for the units a meter recorded in the period — API requests, tokens, gigabytes, minutes, messages — at an agreed rate. "Metered" names the mechanism; [usage-based billing](/glossary/usage-based-billing/) names the pricing model built on it. In practice the terms are used interchangeably.

## How a meter works

- **A metric** defines what is counted and how: *sum* of quantities, *count* of events, *count unique* of a key (active users), *max*, *min* or *last* value in the period.
- **Events** arrive from the product with a quantity, a timestamp and an idempotency key, so a retried event never counts twice.
- **Late events** — ones that arrive after their period — must land in the period they belong to, or be corrected on the next invoice.
- **Refused events** (unknown metric, unknown customer) need somewhere to go other than silently disappearing.

## Why it matters

The meter is the revenue record. A meter that drops 1% of events underbills by 1%, invisibly, every month. A meter that double-counts produces the overage dispute. Accuracy — deduplication, late-arrival handling and a queue for refused events — matters more than pricing flexibility.

## How Fynex does it

Fynex's metering accepts events one at a time, in batches of up to 500, by CSV or through signed inbound webhooks, deduplicates on the idempotency key, places late events in their period, and holds refused events in a dead-letter queue for redrive. See [usage-based billing](/saas/usage-based-billing/).