Payment Infrastructure for AI SaaS

The unit you sell is a token, a tool call, or a job completed — not a seat. Yet most billing stacks still assume a flat monthly subscription and a single price. Macropay is the Merchant of Record for teams whose costs and revenue both move with usage: we run the metering, price the consumption, file the tax, and show you the margin on every customer.

Why generic billing breaks for AI

A spreadsheet of flat plans falls apart the moment one account burns 200x more inference than another. Four problems show up on day one:

Usage swings by orders of magnitude

The same customer might send 800 tokens at 9am and 400,000 at noon. Your meter has to capture every event at that granularity — no dropped requests, no double counts — because each one is money in or money out.

Every model has a different cost

A reasoning model for hard prompts, a small model for classification, an embeddings model for retrieval — each carries its own per-token rate. Billing that treats them as one bucket either overcharges customers or quietly erodes your margin.

You can't see what a customer costs you

Knowing what someone pays tells you half the story. Without the upstream model spend sitting next to the invoice, you can’t spot the power user who’s underwater or the prompt that doubled your COGS.

Subscriptions and metering have to coexist

Most AI plans bundle credits into a tier, then bill overage on top. That means real subscription logic and real usage aggregation in one system — not two tools stitched together with a nightly cron.

Pick how you charge

With Macropay everything you sell is a product — one-time or recurring, same API. The pricing model is a setting on that product, so you can change how you charge without re-plumbing your integration:

Model	Good for
Usage-based (metered)	Pure consumption — per token, per request, per generated asset
Seat-based	Team tools where price scales with members
Credits	Prepaid balances or monthly grants drawn down by usage
Fixed + metered	A base tier with included credits, then overage
Pay-what-you-want / free	Open-source tiers, design partners, freemium funnels

Three ways to instrument it

Capture token cost automatically

Wrap your LLM calls with the @macropayments/ingestion SDK. It reads token counts and model metadata off each response and ships a usage event — no metering pipeline to build and maintain.

import { Ingestion } from "@macropayments/ingestion";
import { LLMStrategy } from "@macropayments/ingestion/strategies/LLM";
import { openai } from "@ai-sdk/openai";

// Bill summarization runs at $3 per million tokens.
const ingestion = Ingestion({
  accessToken: process.env.MACROPAY_ACCESS_TOKEN,
})
  .strategy(new LLMStrategy(openai("gpt-4o")))
  .cost((ctx) => ({
    amount: (ctx.metadata.totalTokens / 1_000_000) * 3.0,
    currency: "usd",
  }))
  .ingest("ai-usage");

Works with the Vercel AI SDK (TypeScript) and PydanticAI (Python), across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and any provider those frameworks support.

Route through the AI proxy

Already calling an OpenAI-compatible API? Point it at Macropay’s /ai/v1 endpoint and every completion is metered and cost-attributed as it streams through — zero changes to your request shape.

curl https://api.macropay.ai/ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MACROPAY_ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "gpt-4o",
    "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Draft a release note." }]
  }'

Bill agents by outcome, not just tokens

For agentic products, raw token counts are a weak proxy for value. The Signals API lets you bill on what the agent actually did — a ticket resolved, a lead qualified, a deployment shipped — and attribute it to the customer.

curl https://api.macropay.ai/v1/signals \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MACROPAY_ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "signals": [{
      "kind": "outcome",
      "event_name": "ticket_resolved",
      "external_customer_id": "support-bot-user-42",
      "external_id": "ticket_8Qp2",
      "data": { "agent": "support-bot", "minutes_saved": 14 }
    }]
  }'

Outcome signals roll up into value receipts that certify ROI to your customer — time saved, revenue generated, cost avoided — and into your agentic margin: billed revenue versus the AI cost of producing it, per agent.

See your margin, not just your revenue

Metering is only half the picture; the other half is what each call cost you. Cost Insights pairs upstream model spend with customer revenue so you can act on it:

Gross margin per customer and per agent
Cost traces for individual LLM spend
Per-model breakdowns to guide model selection
Profitability alerts before a customer goes underwater

What Merchant of Record covers

You meter usage; we handle the rest of the money. As the legal seller of record, Macropay:

Files and remits tax worldwide

EU VAT, UK VAT, US sales tax and more — calculated, collected, and filed for you. You never touch a return, and your tax liability stays with us.

Fights chargebacks

We’re the merchant on the customer’s statement, so disputes route to us. We work to prevent them and manage the ones that land.

Carries PCI scope

Cards are tokenized in our PCI DSS Level 1 compliant vault. Sensitive data never reaches your servers.

Issues compliant invoices

Every receipt carries the correct tax treatment for the buyer’s jurisdiction, globally.

Patterns that ship on Macropay

Writing & content tools

A monthly tier with included words, overage past the allowance, and per-model cost tracking to tune which model handles which prompt.

Inference & API platforms

Pure per-token or per-request pricing, volume tiers for big accounts, and a self-serve usage view in the customer portal.

AI features inside SaaS

A fixed subscription plus metered AI add-ons, or a credit allowance that AI actions draw down each cycle.

Agents & assistants

Outcome-based billing through the Signals API, value receipts that prove ROI, and per-agent margin so you know which agents pay for themselves.

Pricing

4.5% + 50¢

Per successful transactionCovers tax filing, remittance, dispute handling, and all billing infrastructure. +0.5% on subscriptions; +1.5% on international cards.

$0 to start

No setup fees, no monthly minimumFree ACH and SEPA payouts. You pay when your customers pay you.

Ship metered billing today

Create your account

Define a meter

In the dashboard, add a meter that filters your usage events and aggregates the quantity you bill on — token sum, request count, or an outcome signal.

Attach pricing to a product

Create a product and pick its model: a subscription with included credits and an overage rate, or pure per-unit usage pricing.

Send your first event

Drop in the ingestion SDK, route through /ai/v1, or post to the Signals API. Each event meters and bills automatically.

Hand off the money

Macropay runs invoicing, tax, disputes, and the customer portal. You stay on the product.

Start building

Spin up an account and bill your first metered request.

Read the guide

A deeper walk through billing for LLM inference and protecting your margin.

​Why generic billing breaks for AI

​Pick how you charge

​Three ways to instrument it

​Capture token cost automatically

​Route through the AI proxy

​Bill agents by outcome, not just tokens

​See your margin, not just your revenue

​What Merchant of Record covers