Prepaid Credits & Real-Time Limit Enforcement
If you’re building an AI or API product, you know the failure mode: usage costs you money the second it happens, but billing only reacts at the end of the month. Meteroid now draws down prepaid balances in real time, caps what any customer can spend, and hard-blocks the moment money or quota runs out — then nets everything into the invoice so no cent is ever billed twice. It’s the “stop serving when the customer runs out” primitive, built into your billing system.
- Prepaid wallets & credit packs. Every customer can hold a prepaid balance, funded by the credit they buy. Sell credit packs inside a plan (topped up every cycle) or as one-time add-ons, and throw in bonus credits without touching the price.
- Real-time drawdown with hard limits. Check a customer’s balance with a single API call before you serve a request, or draw it down automatically from your usage events. When the balance runs out, the next check is blocked, with a guaranteed cap on any overspend.
- Auto-topup that can’t run away. Balances can refill themselves once they hit a threshold, with built-in guardrails: one top-up at a time, cooldowns, daily caps, and automatic suspension after repeated payment failures.
- Budget & usage limits. Set a spending limit on any customer, scoped to a whole account or down to a single metric. See what’s been spent live, and let customers set their own limits right from your portal. On the usage side, plan limits enforce in real time too, with optional grace and warnings.
- Exactly-once, into the invoice. When an invoice is finalized, real-time charges are matched against usage so every cent is billed exactly once — by the wallet or by the invoice, never both. Real-time webhooks (balance low/depleted, top-up succeeded/failed, limit reached/reset) keep your app in the loop as it happens.
Why it matters
- Real time, not tomorrow’s report. Customers are stopped at their limit as it happens, not flagged in an alert after they’ve already overspent.
- Fair by default. A blocked request never eats into what the customer paid for, and “blocked” always means blocked.
- The primitive AI products are missing. Inference costs you money the instant it runs, so prepaid plus a hard stop is how you stay margin-safe by construction.
What you can do
- Sell prepaid credit packs (with bonus credits), and let auto-topup keep your power users flowing.
- Put a spending limit or usage cap on any customer, project, or metric, and trust that “blocked” means blocked.
- Wire balance-low and limit-reached webhooks into your product to act before anyone hits a wall.
Getting started
Talk to us with your use case to get started.