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What is Autumn?

Autumn is your source of truth for billing and entitlements between your application and Stripe. It manages subscription state, credit balances, feature entitlements, and usage enforcement — the logic you’d otherwise build and maintain across your codebase, database, and Stripe webhooks. Your app can query Autumn inline to determine what a customer is allowed to do (send an AI message, access SSO, add a seat) and to track usage against their balance. For latency-sensitive paths, checks and tracking can also run through an edge cache in your own cloud. Because billing logic lives in Autumn, pricing changes and custom deals become a simple configuration change. No migrations or rebuild.

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Why use Autumn?

AI monetization is harder than what came before. For reference, OpenAI wrote a post about their in-house system. Billing starts with a simple checkout flow, and balloons in complexity as you add more features and scale. And when you want to change your pricing, you need to rebuild everything. Yet, it’s a critical part of your product that you cannot afford to get wrong. You can choose to build this yourself, or use Autumn to offload all this logic out of your codebase. It’s less work, more flexible, and more reliable.

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How is this different?

Other billing tools are designed for post-hoc invoicing: you send usage events, they generate invoices at end of period. Your app still owns access control, usage limits, and plan change logic. Autumn is a real-time system of record. You can query it for the current state of any customer (plan, entitlements, balances) inline, via cache, or via webhooks. Because Autumn owns the state (not your code or database), edge cases like proration, failed payments, and concurrency are handled automatically. Pricing changes become config, not code. Autumn builds on top of Stripe rather than replacing it. Your subscriptions, customers, and payment details stay in your own Stripe account.
While Autumn’s core focus is credit-based AI monetization, it handles any SaaS pricing model. Many of our users have no usage-based features at all, and just prefer the developer experience (eg, no webhooks).

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FAQ

Yes. Autumn works with Stripe — it handles the billing logic that Stripe doesn’t. You keep your Stripe account, your customer relationships, and your payment data. Autumn sits between your app and Stripe, managing webhooks, usage limits, and state.Your subscriptions live in Stripe. You’re never locked in.
For most apps, calling check before each action is fine. For latency-sensitive paths, you have three options:
  • Deploy the edge cache. It runs in your own AWS account and answers check and records usage from inside your network, with no round trip to Autumn. Your code stays the same: point the SDK at it and it falls back to Autumn on its own. Learn more.
  • Cache the customer object yourself, and refresh it when you track usage or change plans.
  • Copy Autumn state into your own database using the billing.updated webhook.
Not being able to reach Autumn does not mean your app goes down. The SDKs default to fail-open and fail-fast, meaning in a worst case, some users get temporary additional access.If you run the edge cache, checks keep working through an Autumn outage, because it answers from the last balances Autumn sent it. If the edge cache itself goes down, the SDK sends checks straight to Autumn instead.Tracked usage is queued on our side and replayed automatically, so balances catch up on their own once Autumn recovers.
Orb and Metronome focus on usage metering — tracking how much customers consume for end-of-period invoicing. You still build access control and state management separately.Autumn is a complete system of record: usage metering, entitlements, feature gating, and billing state in one API.
Autumn is open source. You can self-host anytime, or export all your data. Your Stripe subscriptions, customers, and payment details remain yours.You can migrate gradually: replicate customer state into your own system via webhooks, then make a full transition.
If you’re setting up payments for the first time, most teams go live in under an hour. Migrating from an existing billing system typically takes 1–2 weeks depending on complexity.For larger companies, we provide a forward-deployed service: dual-write to your internal system and Autumn, then migrate over.
Autumn supports 10,000+ events per second per end customer. If you have specific throughput requirements, reach out and we’ll walk through the architecture.For very hot paths, the edge cache handles checks and tracks from inside your own cloud.

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