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Consumption Pricing: How It Works + Implementation Guide
Learn how consumption pricing works, the infrastructure it requires, and how engineering teams implement usage-based pricing.
Amberflo pricing explained for engineers. Learn more about plans, costs, pricing models, and how usage-based billing scales with event volume and revenue.
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Amberflo doesn't publish flat monthly prices. Pricing scales with event ingestion volume and the amount you invoice, which means your cost grows in line with your AI usage.
There are two plans:
I compared the different pricing options to see how each works in practice. Here's what each plan covers, what you actually pay for, and where Stigg fits on top.
Essential covers the full Amberflo feature set for teams that are early in scaling.
What's included:
Best for: Product and engineering teams that need usage visibility, billing automation, and margin tracking as they scale their AI product. If you're launching usage-based or credit pricing for the first time, this is the starting point.
The trade-off: Scale limits apply. Teams with high event ingestion volumes or enterprise compliance requirements will need to move to Custom.
Custom builds on Essential with enterprise-grade infrastructure, support, and deployment options.
What's included:
Best for: Engineering teams running AI workloads at scale with bursty, high-cardinality event streams. Also fits companies where enterprise customers need SLA guarantees and dedicated support as part of the contract.
Amberflo charges on two dimensions:
Amberflo’s pricing is usage-based, with no seat fees or upfront limits, so costs scale with your product instead of ahead of it.
The system is built around events as the core unit. Everything from billing to cost and revenue tracking runs on that stream, so if it impacts usage or margin, it needs to be captured as an event and processed downstream.
Amberflo supports the full range of AI-native pricing models without the need for custom billing logic:
New pricing models can be configured in the dashboard without engineering changes to the product. That's the practical value of the Price Machine layer: pricing logic stays out of application code.
Amberflo works well when you want usage, cost, and billing tied together without stitching multiple systems. It relies on the event stream as the source of truth, so the same data drives cost tracking, margin, billing, and revenue instead of duplicating logic across tools.
In practice, everything builds on events:
On top of that, cost attribution and controls sit on the same layer, which keeps things consistent:
Amberflo is worth it if you …
Skip Amberflo if you …
Amberflo’s pricing follows how your system actually works. You pay for the events you process and the revenue you bill, so costs scale with usage instead of being locked into seats or tiers.
The Essential plan is enough to get something real into production without committing too early.
It really starts to click when cost is part of the product, especially with AI workloads where inference spend needs to tie back to each customer. If that connection matters to you, the model makes sense.
If you are still on flat subscriptions, you are likely paying for a lot you do not need, and a simpler billing setup will fit your architecture better.
Amberflo handles metering and billing. It records what happened and generates invoices. That decision has to run in the request path, synchronously, before your application responds. Billing infrastructure was never designed for this.
A usage runtime sits between your product and billing stack and handles that enforcement in one place. Access state, credit balances, and usage limits are resolved at low latency on every request.
Billing continues to do what it does. The usage runtime controls what happens next.
Stigg approaches this as runtime infrastructure:
The integration is additive. Stigg plugs in above Amberflo without replacing it, so there’s no rip-and-replace. Amberflo keeps ownership of metering and invoicing, while Stigg owns the control plane.
If Amberflo solves your billing layer, Stigg takes care of the runtime access and usage control that your billing stack was never built to handle.
When enforcement logic is scattered across services and handled through custom code, the infrastructure is missing a dedicated control layer. See how Stigg fits into your architecture.
The main difference between Amberflo Essential and Custom is scale and support. Essential covers core metering, billing, and cost tracking, while Custom adds higher limits, SLAs, and enterprise support.
No, Amberflo does not replace Stripe. Amberflo handles metering and invoicing, while Stripe handles payments, retries, and collection, so they are typically used together.
The main difference between Amberflo and Metronome is scope. Amberflo connects cost, margin, and billing in one system, while Metronome focuses on usage-based billing with rate cards and contracts.
No, Amberflo does not handle entitlements. Amberflo tracks usage and generates invoices, while entitlements control access and limits at runtime, which requires a separate layer like Stigg.