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Tessera

§ 00Billing infrastructure

Bill for what they use.

Tessera meters every event your product emits, prices it against any plan you can describe, and sends invoices your customers can check line by line.

Start buildingRead the docs
$ curl api.tessera.example.com/v1/events \
    -d customer=cus_8f2a \
    -d meter=api.requests -d value=1

Invoice INV-2026-0418

Northwind Robotics

Draft, live
Invoice line items
ItemAmount
Platform fee$500.00
API requests$736.48
Storage, GB-month$48.51
Seats over 25$72.00
Due Nov 1$1,356.99
api.requests / hour, last 7 days
18.4M
LessMore

Invoicing $2.1B a year for

  • Halyard
  • ORBITAL/9
  • Kiln
  • minted
  • Vantage Rail
  • Parallax
  • SOLSTICE
  • Cobble

§ 01Platform

One pipeline from event to invoice.

Most billing breaks in the gaps between metering, pricing and invoicing. Tessera runs all three on the same ledger, so every number on an invoice can be traced back to the events that made it.

  1. Meter

    Step A

    Send events from any service. Tessera deduplicates by idempotency key, aggregates in real time and keeps the raw log for audits.

    • 14:02:11.208api.requests+1
    • 14:02:11.231storage.gb+0.04
    • 14:02:11.240api.requests+1
    • 14:02:11.262seats.active=31

  2. Price

    Step B

    Describe plans as data: tiers, packages, minimums, credits and per customer overrides. Change a price and preview every affected invoice first.

    Example volume tiers per 1,000 requests
    0 to 1M$0.05 / 1k
    1M to 10M$0.04 / 1k
    10M and up$0.03 / 1k

  3. Invoice

    Step C

    Close the period on the customer's own calendar. Each line links back to the events behind it, so disputes take minutes, not weeks.

    • Platform37%
    • Requests54%
    • Storage4%
    • Seats5%

  • Real time balances

    Prepaid credits and spend alerts update within a second of each event.

  • Versioned plans

    Every price change is a new version. Grandfather customers with one flag.

  • Tax and revenue

    Tax lines per region, plus revenue schedules your finance team can export.

  • Webhooks

    Signed events for invoice, payment and threshold changes, retried for 72 hours.

  • 135 currencies

    Price in one currency, invoice in another, with the rate locked per period.

  • Audit ready

    Immutable event log, SOC 2 Type II, and SSO with role based access.

§ 02Developers

An API you can read in one sitting.

Four resources: customers, meters, plans and invoices. Typed SDKs for TypeScript, Python, Go and Ruby, and a test mode with a clock you can fast forward.

p99 ingest
38 ms
SDKs
4
Uptime, 12 mo
99.999%
Event retention
7 years

Request: create a usage plan

// plans are plain data, versioned on every change
await tessera.plans.create({
  key: "growth",
  base: { amount: 500_00, interval: "month" },
  meters: [{
    meter: "api.requests",
    tiers: [[1e6, 5], [1e7, 4], [Infinity, 3]],
    per: 1000,
  }],
});

Response 201

{ "id": "plan_growth_v3", "version": 3, "preview": "412 invoices change" }

§ 03By the numbers

Sustained ingest per region
1.2Mevents / secSustained ingest per region
Between metered and invoiced usage
0.00%driftBetween metered and invoiced usage
Median time from signup to first invoice
11 dto launchMedian time from signup to first invoice
Invoiced through Tessera
$2.1Bper yearInvoiced through Tessera

§ 04Customers

Invoices nobody has to defend.

  • Case 01

    “We moved 1,400 enterprise contracts off spreadsheets in a quarter. Finance closes the month in two days now, and nobody argues about the invoice.”

    Priya RamanVP Finance, Halyard

    2 daysmonth end close, down from 9

  • Case 02

    “Every line on the invoice links to the raw events. Our support team answers billing questions without paging an engineer.”

    Jonas LindqvistHead of Platform, ORBITAL/9

    -82%billing tickets

  • Case 03

    “We tested four pricing models in six weeks. The preview showed exactly who would pay more before we shipped a single change.”

    Ama OwusuHead of Growth, Parallax

    4pricing experiments in a quarter

  • Case 04

    “The test clock is the best feature nobody talks about. We fast forward a year of renewals in CI on every pull request.”

    Diego FerrazStaff Engineer, Kiln

    365 dof billing simulated per CI run

§ 05Pricing

Priced like the product you are building.

A flat platform fee plus a small share of what you bill. No per seat charges, no setup fees, and nothing until you send real invoices.

Early stage startup? Get a year of Startup free.

Plan 01

Developer

Everything you need to model pricing and send your first invoices.

$0forever

Free up to $10k billed per month

Start building
  • Unlimited meters and events
  • Test mode with test clocks
  • Hosted invoices
  • Community support

Plan 02

Most chosen

Startup

For products with real revenue and pricing that keeps changing.

$200per month

Includes $100k billed, then 0.4%

Billed yearly, $2400

Start 14-day trial
  • Tiers, packages, credits and minimums
  • Price change previews
  • Customer usage portal
  • Revenue and tax exports
  • Webhooks with 72 hour retries
  • Email support, 1 business day

Plan 03

Enterprise

For contract heavy sales, many entities and strict audit needs.

Custom

Volume pricing

Talk to sales
  • Custom contracts and ramps
  • Multi entity and multi currency
  • SSO, SCIM and audit log export
  • EU or US data residency
  • 99.99% uptime SLA
  • Named billing architect

§ 06FAQ

Questions, answered.

Still curious? Email hello@tessera.example.com or read the engineering blog.

No. Tessera meters, prices and invoices, then hands payment to the processor you already use. Stripe, Adyen and Braintree connect in a few minutes, and you can switch later without touching your plans.

§ 07Get started

Ship the pricing page you actually want.

Free until you bill $10k a month. Most teams send their first real invoice within two weeks.

Start buildingTalk to an engineer