OpenMeter

What is OpenMeter?

OpenMeter is an open-source usage metering platform designed to process high-volume, real-time event streams for AI, API, and cloud infrastructure organizations. The solution serves as a specialized metering layer that aggregates raw consumption data—such as tokens, API calls, or compute time—to facilitate usage-based billing, entitlement enforcement, and real-time cost visibility.

Key Capabilities

Real-Time Event Ingestion: Ingests usage events using the CloudEvents format. The platform supports multiple aggregation types, including SUM, COUNT, AVG, MIN, and MAX, to translate raw telemetry into billable metrics.
Usage-Based Entitlements: Enables real-time enforcement of quotas and usage limits. According to the developer, the system can gate feature access or trigger alerts when customers approach predefined consumption thresholds.
Subscription & Credit Lifecycle Management: Manages mid-cycle subscription changes, proration, and prepaid credit grants. The platform utilizes priority-based burn-down rules to manage credit consumption across diverse product tiers.
Developer-First Integration: Provides SDKs for Go, Python, and Node.js, along with a REST API for integrating metering directly into application workflows.
Analytics & Customer Transparency: Offers token-based self-service dashboards that allow end-users to monitor their own consumption and projected costs in real-time.

Audience & Use Cases

Audience: Software engineers, platform architects, and finance operations teams at consumption-based SaaS and infrastructure providers.
Use Case: Scaling token-based billing for LLM applications, enforcing API rate limits based on subscription tiers, and providing real-time infrastructure cost transparency to enterprise customers.

Technical Specifications

Architecture: Built on a high-performance stack utilizing Go for the core processing engine.
Data Pipeline: Employs Apache Kafka for event buffering and ingestion to manage back-pressure in high-throughput environments.
Storage Layer: Uses ClickHouse for real-time aggregation and analytical storage, alongside PostgreSQL for managing metadata, subscriptions, and billing logic.
License: Open-source under the Apache 2.0 license.

Acquisition Note: In July 2026, Kong, Inc. announced the acquisition of OpenMeter to integrate its metering technology into the Kong Konnect platform.