Product
Crediball vs. building it yourself.
Usage-based billing for AI is a real engineering project: metering, pricing, a paywall, payouts, and a dashboard to change any of it without a deploy. Here's what that looks like built in-house versus wrapped in an afternoon.
| Building it yourself | Crediball |
|---|---|
| A price change means editing a pricing table and redeploying | Change any price from the dashboard, live, no deploy |
| You build Stripe Connect, payouts, and invoicing from scratch | Stripe Connect payouts to your own account, out of the box |
| You store full customer profiles to track usage | Stores an anonymous user ID — no names, no emails required |
| Testing billing means charging a real card in test mode, carefully | Sandbox mode: free, unlimited, on by default |
| Token usage and model cost tracked by hand, per provider | Wrap your model client once — usage shows up automatically |
| Pricing decisions based on gut feel or a spreadsheet | An AI Monetization Agent that finds unpriced actions and suggests prices |
| Weeks of engineering before the first dollar | Wrap an action, sync, price it — usually an afternoon |
When building it yourself still makes sense
If your pricing never changes, you have no AI model costs to track, and you’re comfortable owning Stripe Connect and metering code indefinitely, a bespoke system can still be the right call. Crediball exists for the far more common case: pricing that changes as your models and margins do.
See the difference on your own app
Sandbox mode is free — wrap one action and compare for yourself.
Get started