Usage billing

An optional company.operating.usageBilling specification defines genuine perpetual-free accounts with recurring UTC-month allowances. Each product has a named meter, exact integer tariff and variable-cost ratio, daily technical capacity, prerequisites, and customer-authorized overflow limits. These are authored simulator contracts. They are not estimates of a real company’s prices or customer response.

Free usage incurs real variable costs. Only served, authorized units above the free allowance earn revenue. Quota-denied requests are recorded separately from technical service failures. Usage invoices close the consumed month in arrears; payment collects an existing receivable rather than granting a prepaid subscription or earning revenue a second time. Day0 contains no historical earned usage, and initial usage tasks start at a UTC month boundary. usagePeriod.endedOnDay is the inclusive final consumed service day.

Buying capacity

The existing service_capacity_expansion operation accepts an optional productId:

{ "kind": "service_capacity_expansion", "productId": "analytics", "blocks": 2 }

In a usage business, productId is required and must identify a product with its own published capacityExpansion quote. Each quote declares units per block, upfront cents per block, monthly hosting cents per block, shared engineering setup hours, delivery lead days and a maximum reserved/installed block count. An order cannot use the cheaper core quote or increase another product’s capacity. Product purchases do not change the core service capacity.

The order spends real cash and shared engineering hours. Its additional units become usable only after all setup work and the delivery lead have completed. Calendar-day hosting charges then accrue even when capacity is idle. Cancellation preserves sunk spending and grants no capacity; completed purchases continue hosting through the run. Limits apply separately to each product across active and installed orders. The independent infrastructure audit checks order scope, every-prefix limits, actual allocated work, delivery dates, upfront costs and daily hosting expenses.

The public planner resolves the same disclosed product quote and reserves future hosting, including short-February accrual and completed purchases newer than the latest report. The existing dashboard capacity form selects a quoted product and names its meter units. More capacity does not override customer consent, monthly spending limits, an unavailable prerequisite or an external service outage.

Without usageBilling, omitted productId retains the original core-capacity operation and task-over-company quote precedence. Product identifiers are rejected in that mode. Optional usage fields do not get added to historical non-usage seals.

Qualification boundary

Primitive metering and capacity tests do not establish full company solvability or calibrate economic coefficients. Usage retention, complete financial reconstruction, actual-free acquisition experiments and long-horizon private tasks require their own integrated checks. Free signups, payment authorization, earned usage, collected cash and recurring subscription revenue are distinct quantities; existing subscription experiment results must not be relabeled as freemium outcomes.

Experiments with free organizations

A usage company can opt into a task growth market with outcome: "usage_contribution". The ordinary finite audience/channel/timing/budget experiment uses actual shared market prospects and the existing account identity. Signup creates a genuine free organization. It does not start a trial, charge a flat subscription or imply payment consent. Current usage experiments accept only the neutral compatibility offer: zero discount, one monthly period. Discounts, annual usage offers and within-account cross-sell are not implemented.

The registered study fixes each assigned prospect’s follow-up length. All assigned prospects, including nonsignups and ineligible/unexposed prospects, remain in the intention-to-treat denominator. The report separately counts free signups, authorized organizations, organizations with actual net collected payments and retained paying organizations. Multiple metered products do not multiply the organization count. Free and paid service both incur actual variable costs.

Within that fixed window, contribution is actual earned metered revenue, less actual variable metering costs and attributed setup, delivery and cancellation expenses. In-window refunds reverse earned and collected amounts once. Fixed hosting, payroll and later lifecycle costs remain in company finances; this cohort statistic is not lifetime profit or subscription MRR. Thirty-two days is the minimum permitted follow-up; the public recommendation is60days to include monthly collection. Neither interval guarantees payment. The compatibility quotedPriceCents field is inert for this mode: only the disclosed usage tariffs create charges.

Rollout requires a mature registered study and applies its chosen neutral policy to future real prospects. Cancellation stops future delivery, preserving existing accounts, incurred costs and follow-up. The report measures the tested shared-capacity allocation; it does not assert an isolated full-market effect, statistical significance or causal superiority. Task contracts can require actual matured cohorts, actual paid accounts, net contribution and rollout assignments. The independent growth checks bind registration, assignment, delivered exposure, costs and account origins; independent metering/payment checks reconstruct the underlying service and money with the trusted registered seed. The seed is supplied to verification by the protected finalizer, never by the player.

Collectible overdue usage invoices

collectibleUsageOverdueCents is an optional usage-only objective metric. It sums unpaid usage invoices beginning the day after issuance, excluding only invoices whose payment method is permanently declined. It does not exclude merely delayed, failed or old collectible invoices. An invoice with a permanently declined method remains owed: total overdue receivables, total receivables and net assets are not reduced. Processor restoration and receivables_recovery cannot repair that method; no payment-method replacement operation is currently modeled. Recovery work can retry open invoices within30days of issuance, and does not guarantee success.

The observed business.usageBilling.collections report publishes the aging rule, amounts and invoice counts for both pools. A current issued invoice with a permanently declined method also produces a notice naming the invoice, product and amount; future account classifications and random draws remain private. The independent verifier reconstructs the collectible pool from issued invoices and actual payment receipts, while the usage audit checks the method classification against the trusted registered seed. Rehashing a different decline flag or omitting invoices/payments cannot authorize a lower objective value. Tasks without usage billing cannot reference this metric, and their serialized metrics remain unchanged.