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.
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 also verifies that each rule-written term matches the value the rule produced, so a term that has been altered in transit is rejected 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+.