In simple English
This tool lets you track what your customers use and charge them for it. You can set up flat fees, pay-per-use rates, or a mix of both. It tracks usage events and turns them into invoices automatically. You can run it on your own server or use their cloud service. It costs you server time and setup work to run yourself.
What it is
Meteroid is an open-source pricing and billing platform written in Rust (a programming language known for speed and low memory use). It handles subscriptions, usage metering, quoting, invoices, and customer portals.
What it is good for
Solo builders and startup teams who want to charge for API calls, data storage, or AI tokens without writing a custom billing engine from scratch.
- Handles complex pricing models like flat rates and pay-per-use combined.
- Versioned plans so pricing updates do not break existing customers.
- Includes a customer portal so people can manage their own accounts.
- Requires Docker (a way to run a program inside its own sealed box, so it cannot break anything else on your server) and database setup to self-host.
- Uses AGPL-3.0 licence, which has strict rules if you offer the software as a hosted service to others.
- Relies on ClickHouse and other backend services for high-throughput data storage, adding to server maintenance.
Writing a custom billing engine and usage tracker from scratch.
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git clone https://github.com/meteroid-oss/meteroid.git cd meteroid/docker/deploy docker compose up -d