What is Limitr?
Limitr is the pricing runtime for usage-based software. Every pricing decision — enforcement, metering, billing, alerting — flows from a single policy your team owns. Costs and prices live in the same document that drives enforcement. That's what makes the margin math exact.
The pricing pipeline
- Define — Versioned policy: plans, tiers, meters, rules in one document
- Enforce & Meter — One atomic call checks the limit and records consumption
- Alert — Real-time signals the moment a condition is met
- Bill — Invoices generated from what was actually consumed
- Analyze & Recommend — Pricing agent surfaces margin gaps and suggests policy changes, feeding back into definition
One policy. Every customer. Every vendor. Live. Limitr closes the gap between what you charge and what it costs you — at the moment it matters, not the end of the month.
The alignment problem — one business, four competing truths
Pricing buried in application code creates four distinct problems simultaneously. Every quarter you wait, they drift further apart.
The CTO / CPO
Every time we add or change an AI model, our pricing breaks. And we still can't ship a new tier without a sprint.
The architecture you built to move fast is now the thing slowing every pricing decision down — for engineering and everyone waiting on them.
What's lost: pricing flexibility
The CFO
The board asked about per-customer margin. I had to say we'd get back to them.
Every pricing decision is a bet you can't size until the bill arrives.
What's lost: margin truth
The CRO
The customer wanted a custom tier. Engineering said six weeks. We lost the deal.
The deals you can structure are smaller than the deals you could win.
What's lost: deal surface
The CEO
Our most active customers are also our least profitable. We didn't know until last quarter.
You're optimizing for engagement while your best users quietly destroy your margin.
What's lost: profitable growth
Common questions, straight answers
Does Limitr just track usage, or does it actually enforce and bill it?
All three — and the distinction matters. A lot of tools will tell you what your customers consumed after the fact. Limitr enforces limits at the moment of consumption, meters usage in the same operation, and feeds that data directly into invoicing. It's not a monitoring layer on top of your stack. It's the infrastructure your pricing model runs on — which means overages get blocked before cost is incurred, and what gets billed reflects what was actually consumed, automatically.
Can't we just build this ourselves?
Most teams do — at first. Tracking usage feels straightforward until you need to split billing across multiple products, apply per-customer discounts to specific MCP tool calls, enforce different token budgets per model in the same pipeline, handle mid-period plan upgrades without double-charging, or roll out a new pricing tier without a code deploy. Each of those is a sprint. Together they become a permanent engineering surface that grows with every pricing decision your business makes. Limitr exists because we've seen what that compounds into — and there's a better use for your team's time.
How is this different from just using Stripe?
Stripe was built for product catalogs — fixed plans, seat counts, simple subscription logic. That works until your pricing model involves AI pipelines with dozens of models, hundreds of meters, and real-time enforcement decisions. Limitr is a complete system in its own right: it enforces consumption, meters it, and generates invoices tied to what was actually used — whether you collect payment through Stripe, wire transfer, or anything else. The two-way Stripe integration is there for customers who need it.
Will this add latency to my product?
No. The enforcement check runs in-process at sub-millisecond speed — there's no network round-trip for the enforcement decision itself. In Limitr Cloud, usage events sync asynchronously, so the hot path stays fast while your data stays current. You get runtime enforcement without paying a latency penalty.
Can non-engineers update pricing and plans?
Yes — that's a core design goal. Once Limitr is integrated, any team member with dashboard access and permission can change limits, add tiers, adjust overage rules, or modify plan features without touching code. Every change is versioned and can be rolled back immediately if something goes wrong.
What kinds of usage can Limitr meter?
Any unit you can define. AI tokens (input, output, per model), GPU seconds, outcomes, API calls, storage, agent runs, seats, compute minutes, custom composite units — if you can describe it, Limitr can meter and enforce it. You define what a credit is for your product; Limitr does the rest across your entire stack, regardless of how many vendors or services are involved.
Our setup is complex — multiple products, teams, and AI vendors. Will this work for us?
That's exactly the environment Limitr is built for. Multi-vendor enforcement, per-workspace billing, per-customer entitlements, and alerting on arbitrarily specific conditions are all first-class capabilities on Enterprise. Complex deployments are what the white-glove onboarding is designed to handle — we've been there before, we set it up with you, and we'll have your back as you grow.
How precise can the alerting actually get?
Very. Because the enforcement logic is embedded at the infrastructure layer, alert conditions can be as specific as your business requires — by customer, account hierarchy, plan, entitlement, meter values, team, usage trajectory, or any combination. You're not limited to simple percentage thresholds. Alerts fire in real time to Slack, email, or webhook, with no polling and no approximations.
How does the open source engine relate to Limitr Cloud?
The open source enforcement engine is the same core that powers Limitr Cloud — it runs in-process, is fully self-hosted, and is always free. Sandbox and Enterprise both connect to it via the same two-way SDK. The policy.allow() call is identical whether you're running locally or through Cloud, so you can start with the open source engine and move to Cloud without changing your application code.