AI usage billing gets complicated fast — here's what breaks first

At first, AI billing looks simple. A user makes a request. You charge them. Done… right? Not really. Once your AI product starts getting real traffic, billing becomes much more complicated than expected. You suddenly have to deal with: credits usage tracking retries failed renewals webhook delays refunds async state Stripe fees eating small transactions And that's where most systems start breaking. 💸 Why charging directly per AI request is painful A lot of developers initially try to charge users directly for every AI request. Example: image generation GPT request token usage audio processing The problem is that microtransactions don't scale well with Stripe. Fixed fees quickly destroy margins. And once requests become async, things get messy: requests fail retries happen users refresh events arrive late Now billing and product state start drifting apart. 🪙 Why most AI products move to credits This is why many AI products switch