# Meter what your agents actually do

Send one event per billable action. Clocknext turns it into credits drawn, outcomes billed, and usage you can show a customer.

## Every billable action, captured once

A signal is any event worth charging for: an agent run, a tool call, a batch of tokens, a resolved ticket. Define it once, send it from wherever it happens, and it flows into pricing, wallets, and margin without a second pipeline.

### Decide what counts as billable

Define a signal and what it draws: one credit per agent run, a credit per thousand tokens, a unit per document. Change the rate later without re-instrumenting anything.

### Signal definition

| Signal      | Draws                      | Used in | Active | Ingest |    |
|-------------|---------------------------|---------|--------|--------|----|
| agent.run   | 0 credit per run          | 0 plans |        |        |    |

### Send events from anywhere in your stack

One endpoint takes events from your backend or straight from your agent framework. Same signal, same result, whichever path it arrives on.

| Event   | Endpoint            | Signal    | Customer | Accuracy |
|---------|---------------------|-----------|----------|----------|
|         | POST /v0/events     | agent.run | acme     |          |

### Charge once, even on a retry

Send an idempotency key with each event. A retried call is recognised and rejected rather than billed twice, so a network blip doesn't turn into a refund conversation.

#### Duplicate check

| Idempotency key | First seen | Billed | Rejected |
|------------------|------------|--------|----------|
| run_0f2a         | 0:22:05    | Once   |          |

## How an event becomes a line on an invoice

Four steps, from your code to their bill.

1. Define the signal  
   Name the event and say what one of them draws down.
2. Emit it from your product  
   Send the event when the action happens, with a customer ID and an idempotency key.
3. Clocknext prices it  
   The signal is matched to the customer's plan and converted into credits, outcomes, or units.
4. It lands on the invoice  
   Usage rolls up per cycle, with provider cost attributed to the same signal.

## Part of a bigger set of primitives

Usage metering is part of a bigger platform designed to make AI billing a breeze.

### Pricing experiments

Build a plan from priced, billable components and change it without a deploy.

### Margin control

Provider cost attributed to every signal you bill for, so margin is never a guess.

## Bill for what happened, not an estimate

Usage metering ships with Clocknext's other primitives, ready to feed pricing, wallets, and margin.