Launch HN: OpenMeter (YC W23) – Real-Time, Open Source Usage Metering
We're neck deep in figuring out usage based billing for Fly.io. What we're doing is pretty extreme, and may not be representative of many other people, but it feels like no one's really solved this in a way that makes sense for us.<p>We run millions of tiny VMs. Each gets billed on a number of dimensions: egress, runtime (per cpu / memory combo), storage / io. We also have other metered services: ssl certificates, IP addresses, etc.<p>The thing is, we _already_ have metrics for everything we want to bill. They're in a time series DB (VictoriaMetrics, in this case). Sending a shit ton of events to yet-another-system is complicated and brittle.<p>Your k8s pods example is a good source of my hives. Anything that runs on a timer to fire off events is going to get bogged down and lose data at our scale. And we're not very big!<p>This is a somewhat solved problem for metrics stacks. It's relatively straightforward to scale metrics scrapes. And once we have that infra, it's pretty easy to just start pushing "events" to it when events become useful. We don't end up needing Kafka and its complexity.<p>My dream for billing is: a query layer on top of a time series database that takes data I already have and turns it into invoices.<p>One thing about your post that struck me – the last mile to billing and reporting is the thing we're most interesting in buying. It's less specialized. There also aren't any products out there that have really figured this out, I don't think (we've evaluated pretty much all of them).<p>Usage tracking and reporting is a thing we're ok building, because it's core to our product.