Usage Meter

Usage meters are synonymous to a billable metric i.e., they define how the incoming events are aggregated in order to measure consumption.

If your pricing strategy has features that have variable pricing based on the consumption, you have to define a corresponding usage meter for it.

Here’s how you’ll create a usage meter via the interface:

1. Define Usage Meter:
   1. Access the Usage Meters option on the side menu
   2. Hit the + New Usage Meter button on the top right corner
   3. Enter a meter name and description for the same (Description is optional)
   4. Associate the usage meter with the respective event schema
2. Set Filter Condition: You can choose to aggregate only the events that match certain criteria. The filtering logic needs to be set up in this section.
   1. Choose an Attribute/Dimension
   2. Select the logical operator you wish to apply
   3. Lastly, enter the value it should match/check against
3. Set Aggregation Type: The aggregation types define how the ingested events are compiled and calculated at the end of a billing cycle. They can be of two types.

Aggregation Type	Description	Example Use case
COUNT	Counts the number of times an incoming events occurs, matching it’s conditions. Togai will compute the number of unique events within the given time interval.	1. Number of transactions (payment gateways),2. Number of chat requests (given to ChatGPT)
SUM	Sums a defined property of incoming events. Togai will compute the total of all values reported within a selected time.	1. Total amount of money processed (payment gateways),2. Total GB stored (cloud infra)

Here’s an example of how to go about creating usage meters that shows when to use which aggregation type. Let’s take the example of Stripe Payments. This is what their pricing looks like:

Let’s model their Standard Plan: 2.9% + 30¢ per successful card charge.

To model this 2-part pricing of Stripe, you’ll need to create two usage meters. The event schema to be associated to both the usage meters will look like this:

1. Attribute: Transaction_amount (Unit as USD)
2. Payment Mode: This is incase Stripe wants to charge differently or just segment users based on the Payment mode (Debit card, ACH etc).

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Usage meter 1:

This is to model the first part of the pricing: **2.9% of transaction amount**.

In this case, we need to sum the total transaction amount across various transactions for a particular user and then calculate 2.9% of that.

Clearly, this requires us to use the sum function and so we set the aggregation type to Sum.

If you want to create a usage meter to aggregate only the transactions done using Debit cards and then charge them differently, you can use the Dimension: Payment Mode as a filter condition.

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Usage meter 2:

This is to model the second part of the pricing: **30¢ per transaction**.

In this case, for every unique transaction done by a user we need to increase the counter by 1. So that we can then multiply the final number of the counter with 30 (cents).

Clearly, this requires us to use the count function and so we set the aggregation type to Count.

Notes:

1. Metering is done in real-time to facilitate entitlements.
2. Idempotency of data is maintained (i.e. a record is processed atomically/only once.)