What is Autumn?
Autumn is a pricing and billing layer between your application and Stripe. It owns the subscription lifecycle, credit ledgers, and entitlement state that you’d otherwise build and maintain yourself. Instead of billing logic living in your code and database, your app can query Autumn in real-time to check if a customer is allowed to do something (eg, send an AI message, access SSO, etc). This saves you months of engineering time, and makes pricing changes a simple configuration change.Why use Autumn?
For reference, here’s what a production-grade monetization system looks like in the AI era. OpenAI wrote a blog post about their in-house system.| Feature | Requirements |
|---|---|
| Subscription logic | Checkouts, prorated upgrades, scheduled downgrades, add-ons, trials. 10+ webhook cases. |
| Credit ledgers | Real-time enforcement, periodic vs one-time grants, rollovers, expiration, concurrency control |
| Controls and observability | Auto top ups, spend caps, per-seat allowances, usage analytics, event logs |
| Versioning and grandfathering | Various price IDs, migration scripts, backwards compatibility |
| Enterprise and custom plans | Custom code, tiered pricing, custom credit grants, pilots, expansion logic |
| Edge cases | Plan switching, monthly/annual changes, failed payments, 3DS, race conditions, refunds |
How is this different?
Most billing tools, including Stripe’s built-in metering, are designed for post-hoc invoicing: you send usage events, they generate invoices at end of period. Your app still owns who gets access, when limits apply, how downgrades work (and all the other logic described above). Autumn flips this. Thecheck function is a low-latency API designed to be called before an action is taken, to gate access based on the customer’s plan and balance. Because it runs before the action, Autumn becomes your system of record for subscriptions and entitlements — not your database or Stripe.
This means credit ledgers, real-time enforcement, spend caps, and edge cases around upgrades, downgrades and failed payments are handled automatically. Changing pricing, migrating plans, or setting up custom enterprise contracts become configuration changes instead of code changes.
Architecture-wise, check is designed to be called inline — before every AI generation, API request, or feature gate. Response times are under 50ms via multi-region caching, with atomic handling of concurrent requests so balances stay consistent at scale.
Autumn is built on top of Stripe rather than replacing it. Your subscriptions, customers, and payment details live 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).
Core flow
Model your pricing in Autumn
Model your pricing plans in the Autumn UI, or through a config file. Define your free, paid and any add-on pricing tiers.You can link features to these plans and define their usage limits: both recurring (monthly, yearly), one-time top ups, rollovers, etc.
Handle payments
The
attach function will return a Stripe checkout URL, or confirmation data for an upgrade/downgrade for the plans you defined in step 1.Once paid, the Autumn will grant access to the features on their plan.Check permissions and limits
When a customer tries to do something (eg, use a credit), check in real-time whether they’re allowed to.If the user has access to the feature on their plan, and hasn’t exceeded their usage limit, they will be allowed to do it.
Track usage
If Autumn tells you they’re
allowed access, let them use the feature. Afterwards, you can track the usage to update their balance, or bill them for any usage-pricing.Join us on Discord
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