[nk_mishra]

Hi HN, Nikhil here, CTO at Flexprice.

To add some context to our journey: before coming to HN, we launched on Product Hunt and spoke with over 100 companies to understand how they approach billing for AI and API-driven products. We’ve seen two main approaches:

1. *Homegrown billing stacks:* Many teams build their own systems in-house, but these quickly become a headache—especially as more products move to pure usage-based pricing or hybrid models with fixed fees. These systems are complex, require significant engineering resources to maintain, and ensuring accuracy is a constant challenge.

2. *Building on top of Stripe/Chargebee:* While these platforms are evolving to support usage-based billing alongside subscriptions, they still lack robust workflows for credits—which are becoming the new currency in usage-based models.

With Flexprice, our goal is to make it easy for developers to get started, integrate quickly, and address the less obvious pain points of usage metering and credits management. We’re focused on supporting all the pricing combinations we see emerging among AI-first companies, and on building an eventually consistent engine that can handle the realities of real-world usage data.

AI pricing models are evolving fast, and we’re eager to hear feedback from the HN community on where the pain points really are, so we can target them directly.