Best Practices

Recommendations for building a reliable and scalable usage-based billing integration.

Event Design

  • Use descriptive event names — e.g., api_request rather than event1.
  • Always include an identifier — enables deduplication and safe retries.
  • Send events in real-time — don't batch and send at end of day. Real-time ingestion ensures accurate alerts and dashboards.
  • Use timestamps — if events arrive late, the timestamp ensures they're attributed to the correct billing period.

Reliability

  • Implement retry logic — if the ingestion endpoint returns a 5xx error, retry with exponential backoff.
  • Use idempotent identifiers — ensures retries don't create duplicate usage records.
  • Monitor ingestion health — set up alerts to detect if your event pipeline stops sending.
  • Buffer events locally — if the API is unreachable, queue events locally and replay when connectivity is restored.

Customer Experience

  • Provide usage visibility — let customers see their current usage before they're billed.
  • Set up alerts at 75% and 90% — notify customers before they hit spending limits.
  • Offer credit grants for onboarding — reduce friction for new customers with free credits.
  • Send pre-invoice summaries — give customers a heads-up of their upcoming charge before the billing cycle closes.