Why Chargebee doesn\u2019t fit agent payments
Chargebee is a recurring-billing platform: plans, seats, invoices, dunning, revenue recognition — the machinery of human SaaS subscriptions. It is very good at that, and entirely mismatched to agent customers. An agent does not sign up for a $49/month tier; it makes 300 calls this hour and none tomorrow. Monthly plans, proration and invoice cycles add friction and cost to a workload that should just be metered per request and paid on the spot.
Agent-native monetization is usage-based by default: price each request or tool call, meter it in real time, and settle in the same HTTP exchange. There is no plan to choose and no invoice to send — the payment rides inside the API call. The open-source projects below provide the metering, paywall and settlement pieces to do exactly that.
What to look for instead
- True per-request / per-token metering, not monthly plans
- No signup or plan selection — access granted on payment
- Real-time settlement inside the API call, not invoice cycles
- Sub-cent overhead so per-call charging is profitable