A pricing model is not a counter. It's a ledger. We walk through the four primitives we wished we'd had on day one — idempotent events, per-agent margin, MoR-aware tax, and a credit drawdown that doesn't lie to your CFO — and the 1,800 lines of Postgres it took to ship them.
Twelve months of price experiments, three failed tiers, one screaming finance team. The math behind a flat all-in rate, and why "platform fee" became a dirty word inside the building.
A field report on agent-to-agent commerce: which tools get called, what they cost, how often they fail, and the exact webhook payload we now ship with every metered MCP request.
EU OSS, UK VAT, India GST, AU/NZ GST — how AI and SaaS companies trigger registration without realising, and why one missing return turns into a five-figure problem.
Token-level metering, fail-closed budgets, per-customer margin. Why Stripe Billing wasn't built for AI — and the four primitives an AI-first MoR ships in its place.
The A/B that broke our funnel intuition. What works at $0.18/run vs. $20/seat — and why the "free trial" question is actually three different questions in a trench coat.
The customer paying $99/mo who cost them $312/mo on Claude Opus. The five-seat team that subsidized them. And the dashboard view that took 3 days to ship and 12 hours to pay back.
Account paused. Payouts frozen. 25% reserve. "High-risk" tag. Here's what's actually happening on Stripe's risk side — and the steps that get you processing again.
Disputes are the third-largest cost line on most AI startups' books. The full evidence packet our system assembles in 14 seconds — and the three rules we will not break.
Stripe Tax calculates rates. It does not absorb liability. Here's how US sales tax actually lands on AI and SaaS companies — and what a Merchant of Record changes in 92 jurisdictions.
Per-agent budgets with hard stops, adaptive trial mechanics that learn the funnel, and India GST live in the dashboard. Plus a postmortem on the SSE migration stream we yanked from the release at 11:48pm.
$100k or 200 transactions — the OR matters. How AI startups trip nexus in 4–7 states unintentionally, and the catch-up math when they do.
How the 2018 Supreme Court ruling reshaped US sales tax — and where AI/SaaS sits in the 46-state patchwork that emerged.
Reverse charge looks like a shortcut for B2B EU sales. 38% of self-declared B2B buyers fail VIES verification — and the audit liability falls on you, not them.
Three single-window schemes, all acronyms, all overlapping. A clean walkthrough of which one applies to your AI co — and which one MOSS quietly became.
MRR volatility, intl cards, chargebacks, descriptor, content, refund spikes. Each signal has a documented threshold and a 30-day fix.
The four cash-flow moves that bridge an AI company through a Stripe reserve hold — with the real numbers that worked in 2025.
Every meaningful change to the platform — features, fixes, deprecations, postmortems — written by the engineer who shipped it. Subscribe to the Changelog feed and it lands in your inbox the morning after deploy.
Adaptive trial mechanics replace the old fixed-day model — the engine learns the funnel and chooses paywall, cap, or reminder per cohort. Per-agent budget primitives with hard stops, soft warnings, and webhook hooks. India GST live across 28 states.
You can now point the migration agent at Lemon Squeezy and pull customers, products, prices, subscriptions and discount codes in a single SSE-streamed call. Every step is idempotent — safe to re-run after a partial failure.
The margin-per-agent view that lived in /labs/ for six months is now the default landing dashboard. Real-time gross margin per agent, per model, per customer, with one-click drill-down to the raw events. Saved 14 engineering teams from building it themselves.
One SDK. 4.5% + $0.50 per transaction, all-in. Tax liability removed the day you switch. The blog will still be here on Tuesday.