Chargebee provides metered billing by attaching usage records to a subscription item and rating them at the end of the billing period, with support for tiered, volume and stairstep pricing on those items. That covers a subscription with a usage component. It stops short for cloud and API businesses where consumption is the product rather than an add-on, because Chargebee has no credit wallet primitive and no real-time entitlement check.

Key Takeaways

• Chargebee meters usage by posting usage records against a subscription's metered item, then rating them when the invoice generates.

• Chargebee Billing prices at 0.80% of monthly billing value pay-as-you-go, or $99 per month plus 0.65%, so a consumption business pays a share of its revenue as volume grows.

• Usage-based revenue recognition and multi-source usage ingestion sit on the Enterprise tier, and both plans require Chargebee Billing underneath.

• Chargebee publishes no throughput or latency figure for usage ingestion, which matters when events arrive per API call.

• Entitlements and prepaid credit balances land in your own code, because Chargebee doesn't carry either as a first-class object.

What metered billing does Chargebee actually support?

Chargebee supports metered plan items, usage records posted through its API, and tier-based rating on those items at invoice time. For a SaaS product with a subscription and a usage line, that's a complete path.

• Metered items sit inside a plan, so usage rates against the plan the customer is on.

• Tiered, volume and stairstep pricing apply to the metered item.

• Usage records post through the API or arrive through an integration, then aggregate over the billing period.

• Invoices combine the recurring charge and the metered charge in one document.

How does Chargebee handle usage records and aggregation?

Chargebee aggregates usage records against the subscription's billing period and rates them when that period closes. The aggregation happens for invoicing, not for live enforcement, so a customer's current balance isn't available to gate a request in real time.

• Usage settles at invoice generation, so overspend surfaces after the fact.

• There's no documented balance check to call before serving an API request.

• Multi-source usage ingestion, for pulling usage from more than one system, sits on the Enterprise tier.

• Usage-based revenue recognition is also Enterprise-only, and needs Chargebee Billing alongside it.

Where does Chargebee stop for consumption businesses?

Chargebee stops where the subscription stops being the organising object. Its architecture starts from plans and lifecycles, so consumption pricing gets expressed as a variable line on a plan rather than as the product itself.

Cells come from Chargebee's published pricing and documentation pages, checked 18 September 2026, and say "none" only where Chargebee doesn't publish the capability.