Prepaid credits have become an important billing model for AI and usage-based software. Providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic use prepaid API credits, allowing customers to fund usage in advance and monitor their balances. As companies combine usage-based pricing with subscriptions, prepaid billing infrastructure helps manage credit drawdowns, invoicing, and customer spending visibility.
Building prepaid billing internally can require engineering work when expirations, top-ups, usage corrections, and revenue recognition need to operate together. Prepaid credits can improve spending predictability by giving customers visibility into purchased balances and usage. When combined with spend controls and transparent pricing, they can also help reduce billing surprises.
Key takeaways
- Prepaid billing software should support native credit wallets, drawdown tracking, automatic top-ups, rollover rules, and real-time usage visibility.
- Orb combines prepaid credit ledgers with raw usage events, pricing flexibility, and eligible backdated billing corrections.
- Zuora and Maxio support prepaid billing alongside revenue recognition and finance workflows for businesses with complex contracts.
- Lago and UniBee provide open-source options for teams considering self-hosted prepaid billing and processor flexibility.
- The best prepaid billing setup keeps credit purchases simple for customers while giving finance teams the controls needed for revenue recognition and audit readiness.
What to look for in prepaid billing software
Prepaid billing has different requirements from standard subscription or postpaid usage models. Purchases, drawdowns, rollover, and expiration affect accounting, while customers need visibility into balances and usage.
A strong prepaid billing platform should help teams:
- Create and manage credit wallets with platform-wide or SKU-scoped credits
- Track credit drawdown against usage events in real time
- Handle credit expiration, rollover, and automatic top-ups
- Support hybrid pricing models that combine seats, usage, and prepaid credits
- Generate accurate invoices with proper line-level service periods
- Connect with finance systems for revenue recognition, including requirements under IFRS 15
- Provide customer-facing dashboards for spend visibility and threshold alerts
The selected platform should connect credit activity with customer visibility and finance reporting.
Not all prepaid balances work alike. Some wallets deduct credits directly for measured usage, while others apply an advance payment against future invoices. This affects when balances are updated, whether credits can expire or roll over, and how finance teams account for unused balances. Businesses with minimum commitments or overage charges also need consistent rules for handling depleted wallets.
1) Orb
Orb is a usage-based billing platform that brings prepaid credit management, flexible pricing, and accurate usage metering together. It helps AI, SaaS, and infrastructure companies manage complex billing models as their products and customer needs evolve.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Orb retains raw usage events, enabling precise credit drawdowns, historical analysis, and auditable billing corrections. Its architecture supports eligible backdated pricing changes without sacrificing billing accuracy.
For prepaid credits, Orb provides platform-wide and SKU-scoped credit pools, configurable expiration rules, and automated drawdown tracking through a unified credit ledger.
Key capabilities
- Native prepaid credits with automated top-ups, rollover rules, and balance tracking
- Raw usage event storage for auditable backfills and billing corrections
- Pricing simulations to evaluate changes against historical usage
- SQL-based metrics for advanced usage calculations
- Dimensional price groups for pricing across region, instance type, and environment
- NetSuite integration with native transaction records for finance reconciliation
What to consider
Orb is particularly well-suited to AI, API, and cloud infrastructure companies with evolving usage-based pricing. Its integrated metering, credit management, and finance workflows help teams scale prepaid billing while maintaining accuracy, flexibility, and financial visibility.
2) Metronome
Metronome provides usage metering and billing for AI and software companies. Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome on January 14, 2026.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Metronome supports prepaid credit packs, spending commitments, overages, and near-real-time usage visibility at high event volumes.
Key capabilities
- Configurable usage metrics and event ingestion
- Streaming usage updates and spend alerts
- Prepaid credit commits and overage handling
- Billions of events per day processing capacity
- Published customers include OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA
What to consider
Metronome is designed for high-throughput scenarios where volume and real-time visibility are priorities.
3) Chargebee
Chargebee provides subscription and usage billing for more than 6,500 businesses, including support for credit-based and hybrid pricing.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Chargebee provides configurable credit grants, balances, rollover, and top-ups. Its newer credit-unit APIs remain in early access, so availability depends on program access and configuration.
Key capabilities
- Prepaid credit grants, balance tracking, rollover, and top-ups
- Agent billing for AI pricing models
- Over 40 payment gateway integrations
- Named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Recurring Billing Applications
- Automated payment retries, dunning workflows, and AI-assisted payment recovery
What to consider
Chargebee is relevant when the organization needs subscriptions, usage, and credits in one invoice.
4) Lago
Lago is an open-source usage-based billing platform with self-hosted and managed options.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Lago supports prepaid wallets with rollover, expiration dates, balance alerts, and automatic top-ups.
Key capabilities
- Open-source core with AGPLv3 licensing
- Prepaid credit wallets with rollover and expiration handling
- Self-hosted or managed cloud deployment options
- Published customers include Mistral AI and Groq
What to consider
Self-hosting gives teams control over deployment and carries infrastructure and maintenance responsibilities.
5) Stripe Billing
Stripe Billing supports subscriptions, metered usage, and billing credits, with connections to Stripe Payments.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Stripe Billing applies credits to eligible metered charges and supports tiered, volume, and graduated pricing.
Key capabilities
- Billing credits for prepaid balances
- Metered usage with flexible pricing structures
- Comprehensive developer documentation and API libraries
- Stripe Billing's standard pay-as-you-go pricing is 0.7% of Billing volume, with monthly subscription tiers and custom pricing also available
What to consider
Stripe Billing provides a unified billing and payments workflow for companies already using Stripe products. Under its general-availability credits model, applied credits count toward Billing volume; payment-processing costs remain separate.
6) Maxio
Maxio combines subscription billing, SaaS metrics, and revenue recognition, including prepaid credit arrangements.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Maxio supports credit drawdowns and revenue recognition workflows aligned with ASC 606 and IFRS 15.
Key capabilities
- Prepaid credits and drawdown billing
- Built-in ASC 606 and IFRS 15 revenue recognition
- SaaS reporting for ARR, churn, and net revenue retention
- Over 20 payment gateway integrations
- The Grow plan starts at $599 per month for up to $100,000 in monthly billings, with custom pricing on its Scale plan
What to consider
Maxio combines prepaid billing with finance-oriented reporting for SaaS teams.
7) Zuora
Zuora provides enterprise quote-to-cash workflows for organizations managing multiple products, pricing models, and finance requirements.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Zuora supports prepaid configurations and more than 50 pricing models. Its June 2026 AI Monetization Suite includes tools for AI pricing, while its mediation engine is rated for up to 200,000 usage events per second.
Key capabilities
- Over 50 pricing models including prepaid
- AI Monetization Suite launched June 2026
- Deep ERP integration with NetSuite and Salesforce Revenue Cloud
- Recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Recurring Billing Applications
- Zuora uses custom enterprise pricing, with commercial terms depending on the products, usage requirements, and implementation scope
What to consider
Zuora is relevant for organizations with enterprise-scale complexity and dedicated platform administration resources.
8) Alguna
Alguna combines CPQ and billing with no-code pricing configuration, including credit-based models.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Alguna supports prepaid credit allocations and drawdowns through configurable billing workflows.
Key capabilities
- Real-time prepaid credit drawdown
- CPQ and billing, with revenue recognition available by plan or add-on
- No-code pricing configuration
- Onboarding and migration assistance on eligible plans
- A free Starter plan for up to 10 invoices monthly and flat pricing starting at $699 per month on its Growth plan
What to consider
Alguna is relevant for teams that want fast implementation without revenue-based pricing.
9) Solvimon
Solvimon provides hybrid billing and credit wallets with support for multiple payment processors.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Solvimon lets customers draw down credit wallets for usage alongside subscriptions and other charges.
Key capabilities
- Prepaid credit wallets with hybrid pricing support
- Works with Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, and other processors
- Billing-as-code with CLI and API configuration
- AI Essentials waives platform fees on the first $3 million in billed volume for eligible AI startups, then charges 0.4%
- Customer examples include Yapily and SEON
What to consider
Solvimon is relevant when payment processor flexibility matters most.
10) Recurly
Recurly provides subscription management, prepaid account balances, and payment recovery tools.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Recurly lets customers fund account balances in advance and automatically apply them to future subscription or one-time invoices. This differs from metered wallets that deduct credits for each usage event.
Key capabilities
- Prepaid account balance support
- AI-powered payment recovery and dunning
- Recurly Compass AI for churn prediction
- Over 100 million active subscribers served
- Notable customers include Paramount, Twitch, and Cinemark
What to consider
Recurly is oriented toward recurring subscription payments and subscriber retention. Revenue recognition for prepaid account balances remains the merchant's responsibility.
11) Paddle
Paddle provides subscription billing, payments, and tax handling as merchant of record for covered digital transactions.
Why it fits prepaid billing
Paddle has native prepaid usage balances in early-access beta. During beta, balances are tied to subscriptions and do not support top-ups, overage billing, or unused-credit rollover.
Key capabilities
- Merchant-of-record tax handling for covered sales
- Subscription billing with localized checkout in 30+ currencies
- Native prepaid usage-balance functionality in early-access beta
- Paddle's standard pay-as-you-go checkout pricing is 5% + $0.50 per transaction, with custom pricing available for eligible higher-volume businesses
What to consider
Paddle is relevant to digital businesses needing merchant-of-record services alongside subscriptions. External metering tools can support usage requirements beyond the current native beta.
12) UniBee
UniBee is an open-source subscription and prepaid billing platform with self-hosted and cloud options.
Why it fits prepaid billing
UniBee supports prepaid credits, usage-based billing, and connections to different payment gateways.
Key capabilities
- UniBee offers a free open-source self-hosted edition, while its managed cloud plans start at $99 per month
- Native prepaid credits management
- Gateway-agnostic payment processor support
- Real-time usage-based billing
- Flat fees with no revenue percentage
What to consider
UniBee is relevant for teams evaluating open-source alternatives with flexible deployment options.
Why Orb stands out for prepaid billing
Prepaid billing connects credit purchases, usage drawdowns, expirations, and finance reporting.
Orb's standard metering architecture retains raw usage events for granular calculations, historical analysis, and eligible corrections. Hosted Rollups aggregates configured event streams during ingestion for high-volume workloads.
This makes it possible to:
- Apply backdated corrections when late renewals, infrastructure outages, or contract renegotiations require billing adjustments. Orb supports backfills and eligible backdated changes to draft billing calculations. Issued invoices use correction workflows such as credit notes or adjustments.
- Test pricing changes against real historical data using pricing simulations before deployment
- Support dimensional pricing: Orb's dimensional price groups support pricing across multiple usage dimensions, such as region, instance type, and environment, using a single pricing configuration for dimension combinations
- Generate audit-ready invoices with line-level service periods and complete event-to-invoice lineage
For prepaid credits specifically, Orb supports platform-wide credits, SKU-scoped credits, credit expiration handling, and automated drawdown tracking that creates proper accounting records. Finance teams can configure credit rollover rules, automatic top-ups, and threshold alerts.
Its usage-based billing engine supports AI and infrastructure businesses charging for tokens, API calls, or compute usage.
The platform integrates natively with NetSuite to create standard transaction records rather than summary imports, and its finance workflows support revenue recognition, dunning management, and accounts receivable automation.
Orb combines configurable credit models with usage metering, pricing changes, invoicing, and finance workflows.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between prepaid and postpaid billing?
Prepaid billing collects payment before the relevant usage, while postpaid billing generally calculates and charges for consumption afterward. Prepaid credits can improve spending predictability, but the degree of protection depends on overage rules, top-ups, balance enforcement, and customer visibility. Prepaid balances are common in AI products because token and compute costs vary with consumption.
Can prepaid billing software integrate with my existing CRM and ERP systems?
Many platforms integrate with CRM and ERP systems, but the depth of data synchronization varies. Relevant records include contracts, invoices, credit transactions, and revenue schedules.
How does prepaid billing software handle refunds and credit adjustments?
Prepaid billing platforms may offer refunds for unused purchased credits, balance adjustments, and corrections to issued invoices. Treatment depends on contract terms, credit type, and the platform's ledger controls. Promotional grants, purchased credits, and credits issued after an invoice adjustment can have different refund and accounting rules.
How does Orb support prepaid credits alongside subscriptions?
Orb supports hybrid pricing that combines recurring charges with prepaid credit pools. Customers can purchase credits for usage-based features while paying a fixed subscription fee. Orb tracks credit drawdowns, expirations, and eligible top-ups through its credit ledger.
How does Orb support auditable prepaid billing and finance reporting?
Orb maintains raw usage events and credit-ledger records to help trace drawdowns and supported adjustments. Its NetSuite integration creates native transaction records for reconciliation, and Orb maintains SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II reports. Enterprise customers can access additional security and support controls.