Usage & Metered Billing
A metered product doesn’t price at one number. It prices as two parts:
- A committed base subscription — the flat, contractual line price.
- A projected overage — an estimate of what consumption above an included entitlement would cost, from the product’s usage rate card.
Every metered line includes an entitlement (units included at no
charge — e.g. 1,000,000 API calls / month). Overage is charged only on
max(0, estimated usage − entitlement); a line at or under its entitlement
projects zero overage.
Overage walks the rate card’s tiers using the same Slab / Range choice as block pricing:
- Slab (graduated) — each tier prices only the units in its band, summed.
- Range (volume) — the tier the total overage lands in prices every overage unit.
Author it in Product Manager (the usage flag, the usage dimension, and the overage tiers); see the user guide’s Usage Rate Cards and Quoting a Metered Deal. Usage authoring is a Pinion+ capability.
What a renewal does with the committed entitlement and overage rate is set by the usage dimension’s Renewal Behavior: Carry Forward (the default), Uplift, or Reset. The user guide’s renewals and amendments table shows what each one carries.
Setting usage terms by rule
Entitlement and overage rate usually come from the product’s usage dimension and rate card. When they should follow policy instead — “Enterprise accounts get 10,000,000 included calls,” “Partner deals price overage at $0.001” — a Product Rule can write them.
A Selection rule’s Set Field action can target three usage terms on the line:
| Target field | What it writes | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Usage Entitlement | Units included at no charge | Tier the entitlement by segment or contract value |
| Overage Rate | The flat per-unit overage rate | Negotiated or partner rate that replaces the card |
| Estimated Usage | The projected consumption used for quoting | Seed a house estimate instead of leaving it blank |
Three things are worth knowing before you author one:
Rule beats everything. A rule-written term outranks the dimension’s definition value, a rep’s typed override, and the contracted term a renewal or amendment carries forward, and it applies even when the term is not marked editable on the dimension. The rule is the admin’s policy; treat marking a term editable as “the rep may adjust it when no rule speaks.” On a renewal that means a rule writing the overage rate replaces the rate the customer signed, while an entitlement no rule targets still carries — so scope renewal-facing usage rules deliberately.
The rate is used exactly as written. If the dimension carries a per-segment overage-rate ramp, a rule-set rate replaces the ramp rather than becoming its starting point. Every segment of a multi-year line carries the rule’s rate, and the configurator’s Overage rate by segment readout shows that same flat rate on every segment rather than a ramp.
Sub-cent rates are safe. Usage rates are carried at six decimal places, so
a rule setting $0.001 per call persists as 0.001000. It is never rounded
to $0.00.
The rule is re-evaluated on the server during every save, so the term you see on the saved line is the one the rule authorized — not something posted from the browser. The save writes the rule’s value onto the line before it validates the terms, so a term that has been altered in transit is overwritten rather than saved. The server also keeps the projected overage in step: it is always recomputed from whichever entitlement and rate the line ends up with. That is why Projected Overage is not itself a writable target.
Usage terms can also be read by rule conditions and aggregated by Summary Variables without any extra setup, so “flag any quote whose projected overage exceeds $50,000” is a condition, not a customization.
Related
- Block Pricing — the same Slab / Range aggregation choice.
- Licensing & Tiers — usage authoring is Pinion+.