Report · October 2026
We read 64 usage-based pricing pages. Here's what they don't say.
Almost every usage-priced company we looked at sells custom contracts. Almost none publish what happens to credits when a customer changes plan. Each unstated rule is a decision someone in finance makes by hand, every month.
What we did
We took 64 B2B software companies that price on usage: API and infrastructure platforms, AI products sold on credits, and communications and verification tools. For each one we read the public pricing page, plus the billing FAQ, docs or terms where the pricing page pointed to them.
Then we asked the questions a finance team has to answer every time it closes a period on a usage contract. Is a rule stated, and is it stated clearly enough that two people would compute the same invoice?
Share of companies whose public terms don't state the rule
None of this is a criticism of anyone's pricing page. Self-serve pages are meant to be short, and most of these companies close their larger deals on custom order forms we can't see. That's the point: the rules that decide a true-up mostly live in contracts, in a billing admin's head, and in the spreadsheet someone checks before close. If they aren't written down where everyone can see them, they get decided case by case.
Five rules, five different invoices
To show what an unstated rule costs, here are five worked examples. Each takes one contract and computes it under two reasonable readings of the same term. The numbers come from our reconciliation engine or are worked line by line below; you can reproduce most of them in the true-up calculator.
A rollover cap: 20% of the commit, or 20% of what's left?
A contract grants 10,000 credits a month, overage at $1.20 a credit, and says "up to 20% of unused credits roll over." In month one the customer uses 6,000. In month two, 11,500.
| Reading | Rolled into month 2 | Month 2 overage | Month 2 invoice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cap is 20% of the commit (2,000) | 2,000 | 0 | $0 |
| Cap is 20% of the unused 4,000 | 800 | 700 | $840 |
One sentence, one month: $840 apart. Over a year of uneven usage, the same contract produced $600 of overage under one reading and $7,560 under the other. The full year is here.
Overage tiers: do they accumulate over the true-up period, or reset monthly?
A quarterly true-up includes 30,000 units (10,000 a month). Overage is $0.80 for the first 5,000 units, then $0.60. The customer uses 15,000 units in each month of the quarter.
| Reading | Calculation | Quarter's overage |
|---|---|---|
| Tiers accumulate across the quarter | 15,000 over: 5,000 × $0.80 + 10,000 × $0.60 | $10,000 |
| Tiers reset each month | 5,000 over each month at $0.80, three times | $12,000 |
$2,000 apart in one quarter, 20% of the overage, from a word the contract didn't use.
An annual commit "allotted monthly": does unused quota expire each month?
An annual contract commits 120,000 units, allotted at 10,000 a month, with overage at $0.50. Usage is seasonal: 6,000 a month for six months, then 14,000 a month for six.
| Reading | Units over | Year's overage |
|---|---|---|
| Each month's allotment expires at month end | 24,000 | $12,000 |
| The allotment pools across the year | 0 | $0 |
The customer used exactly what they committed to. Whether that costs them $12,000 depends on a rule that, in our sample, was usually unstated.
A mid-term upgrade: new terms from the amendment date, or rerun from the start?
A 12-month contract includes 10,000 units a month with overage at $0.50. The customer uses 12,000 a month and is invoiced $1,000 of overage in each of months 1 to 6, $6,000 in total. In month 7 they upgrade to 15,000 units a month at $0.40 overage.
| Approach | What happens to months 1–6 |
|---|---|
| Open a new segment from the amendment date | Unchanged. The $6,000 already invoiced stands. |
| Rerun the whole contract on the new terms | Recalculated with a 15,000 allowance: zero overage, so a credit against $6,000 of invoices that were correct when sent. |
The second approach is easy to do by accident in a spreadsheet, and it's how finance ends up explaining a credit note nobody intended. More on amendments.
Drawdown order: which credits get used first?
A customer starts the month with 3,000 rolled-over credits that expire at month end, and 5,000 top-up credits they bought at $0.10 each that never expire. They use 3,000 credits.
| Order | Result at month end | Paid credits lost |
|---|---|---|
| Expiring credits first | Rollover used up; all 5,000 top-ups remain | $0 |
| Purchased credits first | 3,000 top-ups used; 3,000 rollover credits expire | $300 |
Small per account, but it's the kind of difference a customer notices, and the kind that turns into a dispute.
How to tell if your own contract is clear
Read your order form's usage clauses against this table. If your wording looks more like the left column, two people on your team could bill the same month differently.
| Rule | Ambiguous | Clear |
|---|---|---|
| Rollover cap | Up to 20% of unused credits roll over. | Unused credits roll over, up to 20% of the monthly commitment (2,000 credits). |
| Rollover expiry | Unused credits roll over to the next period. | Rolled credits expire at the end of the following billing period. |
| Annual allotment | 120,000 units per year, allotted monthly. | 10,000 units per month; unused units expire monthly and do not count toward later months. |
| Tiers | Overage: first 5,000 units at $0.80, thereafter $0.60. | Overage tiers accumulate across each quarterly true-up period. |
| Plan change | Customer may upgrade at any time. | Upgrades take effect on the amendment date. Prior periods are not recalculated. Unexpired credits carry over with their original expiry. |
| Drawdown order | (Not stated.) | Usage draws down credits in order of earliest expiry, then included credits, then purchased credits. |
| Billing timing | Overage is billed as incurred. | Overage is invoiced monthly in arrears at the end of each true-up period. |
The clear versions are examples, not legal advice. Have your own counsel draft contract language.
Who states it well
Clarity doesn't take much space. Two pricing pages from our sample, read on 9 October 2026:
- Cartesia states the cap ("you can accrue up to 2x your monthly rate"), says the cap resets to twice the new plan's rate on a tier change, and says credits already paid for are kept when switching tiers.
- Netlify states that rollover applies only above its base tier, that rolled credits last one more billing cycle, that upgrades take effect immediately while downgrades wait for the cycle end, and that pack and auto-recharge credits aren't affected by tier changes.
Both still leave edge cases open, such as whether rolled credits are used before current ones. But a customer and a billing analyst reading either page would compute the same invoice in nearly every month.
Write your rules down before the next true-up
If you sell commits with allowances, five decisions settle most of the differences above. Write them down per contract, then check last quarter's invoices against them.
- Unused usage: expires, rolls over, or pools across the term?
- Rollover cap: a percentage of the commit or of the balance, and is there a ceiling on the total rolled balance?
- Expiry: when does each rolled or purchased credit lapse?
- Plan changes: effective from when, and what carries over?
- Drawdown order: which credits are used first?
We've put these, plus tiering and billing-timing questions, into a one-page checklist you can fill in for each contract: download the true-up rules checklist (PDF).
Method and caveats
- Sample: 64 usage-priced B2B software companies from our research list, mostly US-based, across API and infrastructure, AI, and communications and verification. It's a convenience sample, not a statistically representative one.
- Sources: public pricing pages, billing FAQs, docs and terms, read on 9 October 2026. No logins, no sales conversations, no private contracts.
- Scoring: each question was marked stated, not stated, or not applicable. "Stated" means the page says the rule outright; partial or contradictory statements count as not stated. Rollover cap and expiry questions apply only to companies that offer rollover. Headcount-style allowances, such as monthly active users, were treated as not applicable to the unused-usage question.
- Limits: pricing pages change often. A few pages couldn’t be fully read; those companies are left out of the questions we couldn’t answer for them. Public self-serve terms aren't contracts, so this measures how clearly rules are disclosed, not whether anyone bills correctly.
We don't name companies in the aggregate figures. If you work at one of the 64 and want your company's scoring, email hello@trueupp.com.
Want to know what your own contracts leave unsaid?
We'll recalculate a sample of your true-ups from the contract terms and show every difference, line by line. Free, within 48 hours of complete files.