- Orb Billing Engine
- Usage metering
- Accuracy
- Security and compliance
- Spend controls
- Experience kit
- Invoicing
- Security and compliance
- Enterprise readiness
- Model pricing
- Credit pools
- Prepaid credits
- Seats & Licenses
- Hybrid Pricing
- Price evolution
- Simulations
- Finance workflows
- Invoicing
- AI contract ingest
- AR aging reports
- Automated collections
- Revenue recognition
- Netsuite
Teams
Segments
Prepaid credits
Build revenue predictability and offer your customers greater flexibility by selling credit balances that customers can draw down against.
Why companies choose prepaid credits
Prepaid credits turn variable usage into something easier to package, easier for customers to budget around, and easier to grow over time. It creates a clearer relationship between commitment, consumption, and expansion.
Give customers confidence
Prepaid credits give customers a predictable way to plan around usage. Avoid surprise bills by paying in advance and use allocations scoped to products or people to build in additional guardrails.
Support mixed GTM motions
Self serve top-ups and drawdown monitoring make it easy to notice when a smaller PLG account is ready for upsell, and up front commitments support common SLG enterprise contract patterns.
Maintain cash flow
For smaller companies, prepaid credits help lock in up front payment without the work of chasing down unpaid invoices or the risk of fraud or abuse.
How it Works
Prepaid credits implementations have two parts: the credit rates and the underlying credit model. How you structure the two will determine how you capture value.
On your pricing page, your plan tiers can revolve around either credit costs or credit allocations. Which you choose will depend on how you are gating value in your product.
- Gated features monetized by credit cost: Your higher tiers get access to more features that aren't directly monetized, but the credits consumed in the background cost more. This is common with companies that are transitioning a mature product to usage-based and want to monetize non-metered features.
- Upselling by usage volume: Plans usually come with a credit commitment, and higher tiers often offer bulk discounts. Some premium features may be based in, but value is primarily captured through greater usage.
Which you choose is primarily a question of where value is hidden in your product. Are you consumption-first? Or consumption-friendly? Are you primarily building features that are easy to meter?
How it Works
In your background credits model, you assign consumption rates for different actions within your platform. There are two ways to think about this:
- COGS + Margins: The simplest way to model consumption. We see this commonly with LLM pricing - a simple tokens in, tokens out calculation that covers the company's cost of serving the models.
- Implied workflow value: More complex or proprietary parts of the platform may have a credit cost that's more difficult to tie directly back to COGS, but consume credits as a way of monetizing the feature.
With credit-based pricing, it's often this background credits model that takes time and insight to optimize more than the actual public pricing.
When this works
- Predictability matters to your customers: If your customers are nervous about usage-based pricing or nervous about horror stories of surprise bills, then having a preset allocation and drawdown monitoring can de-risk the change.
- Cash flow matters to your business: If you are a smaller company that values low-effort collections, then the prepaid nature of this model can be a huge draw.
- You need a simple but flexible value metric: Credits are an excellent starting place, because they can represent both raw token consumption for LLM-based products, and the implied value of a feature or workflow that isn't COGS-based.
Strategy Considerations
Go to Market
Ask: How can we use credits as a sales lever?
Expirations and trials: Can we create time pressure to consume certain credit blocks to encourage users to test or adopt premium features?
Alerts and upsell data: How will we let our reps know when an account is running out of credits or accruing overages so we can start an upsell conversation.
Finance & Operations
Ask: Can we easily recognize revenue on prepaid credits?
Credit ledger: Are you accurately tracing drawdowns on different credit pools in a way your accounting systems can understand?
Breakage revenue: Decide on an expiration date for credits and ensure your billing system can accurately communicate this to your ERP to keep revenue recognition compliant.
Traceable drawdowns: Can your billing system accurately identify what service a prepaid credit was used for and recognize revenue accordingly?
Credit model
Ask: What should a credit represent and how are we capturing value?
Credit types: How many types of credits? Do we have different buckets for different types of actions, or offer "premium" credits?
Rate card: How will we optimize our background calculations of how credits are consumed?
Credit allocations: Do we need to input guardrails for who can consume which credits, or how they can be applied across products?
Key technical Considerations
Supporting a scoped credit pool pricing model requires that your platform already support a high-maturity seats model with clear identity rules and a prepaid credits system with a high-confidence ledger.
Usage-to-ledger Integrity
Ask: Can the system keep balances correct throughout usage periods?
If usage events are not mapped, stored, and deducted correctly, customers can be overcharged or gain access they did not pay for. That creates trust issues on one side and revenue leakage on the other.
Depletion behavior and enforcement
Ask: What should happen operationally when credits run out?
If there is no clear path for what happens when credits run out, customers can lose access without warning or end up confused about what to do next. That makes the model feel arbitrary instead of controlled.
Credit issuance and replenishment
Ask: How simple is it to fund the balance without creating manual operations?
If granting or replenishing credits takes too much manual work, prepaid credits become harder to operate than the value they create. The model should make packaging easier, and avoid any internal friction every time a balance needs to be funded.
Trust, fraud, and auditability
Ask: Can the system be trusted and audited when something goes wrong?
If no one can clearly explain how credits were granted, used, depleted, or adjusted, even small issues can turn into billing disputes, fraud concerns, or finance escalations.
Billing compatibility
Ask: What can prepaid credits actually pay for?
Customers will struggle to understand charges and finance will struggle to keep invoicing clean, if the purpose of prepaid credits are not established clearly. A prepaid model only works if the billing behavior is intuitive and consistent.
Use Cases
Self-serve product access
Common pattern: Customers buy or receive credits up front, usage draws down automatically, and product access depends on whether balance is available.
Benefits: A simple pay-before-you-use motion, giving customers clear control over their spend and the business any unfunded usage.
Free Trials
Common pattern: Users receive a limited promotional balance and use the real product until credits or time window runs out. This is used commonly for businesses to give a hands-on trial period.
Benefits: Customers can see the real product value before upgrading and businesses have a clean way to control exposure and guide conversion.
Enterprise Prepaid Commitments
Common pattern: Customers (enterprise-level) commit to a prepaid balance over a quarter or year timeline, then draw down against it as the usage occurs.
Benefits: Makes procurement and budgeting easier, gives the customer a predictable and clear spend, and the business earlier commitment to their product.
Hybrid Plans with recurring fees and prepaid usage
Common pattern: Customers pay a recurring platform or subscription fee, receive prepaid usage balances, then can top up or pay overages if exceeded.
Benefits: Combines the predictable recurring revenue with flexible usage monetization, and creates a smoother path from base to expansion plans.
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