MeterPilot — Self-Service Usage-Based Billing Engine for Bootstrap AI/SaaS Startups

The Problem

Every AI startup in 2026 faces the same painful moment: they need to charge customers based on usage (API calls, tokens, GPU hours, storage), but implementing usage-based billing is a nightmare. Stripe handles payments but not metering. Building it in-house means weeks of engineering time on edge cases — credits, prepaid balances, overages, proration, multi-dimensional pricing — time that should go into the product.

The existing solutions create a brutal pricing gap. Orb starts at $699/mo. Metronome (now owned by Stripe) is enterprise-only with custom pricing. Amberflo offers a $99/mo startup plan but limits to 10,000 meter events/month — roughly enough for a prototype, not a real business. Lago is open-source and free but requires self-hosting, DevOps expertise, and ongoing maintenance — exactly what a 2-person AI startup doesn't have.

This leaves thousands of early-stage AI companies stuck between "too basic" (Stripe billing) and "too expensive" (everything else), often resorting to spreadsheets or brittle custom code that breaks at scale.