[HN Gopher] Launch HN: OpenMeter (YC W23) - Real-Time, Open Sour...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: OpenMeter (YC W23) - Real-Time, Open Source Usage
Metering
Hi HN! I'm Peter, the co-founder of OpenMeter
(http://openmeter.io). We are building an open-source project to
help engineers to meter and attribute AI and compute usage for
billing and analytics use cases. Our GitHub is at
https://github.com/openmeterio/openmeter, and there's a demo video
here: https://www.loom.com/share/bc1cfa1b7ed94e65bd3a82f9f0334d04.
Why? Companies are increasingly adopting usage-based pricing
models, requiring accurate metering. In addition, many SaaS
products are expected to offer AI capabilities. To effectively
cover costs and stay profitable, these companies must meter AI
usage and attribute it to their customers. When I worked at
Stripe, my job was to price and attribute database usage to product
teams. You can think about it like internal usage-based pricing to
keep teams accountable and the business in the margins. This was
when I realized that it's challenging to extract usage data from
various cloud infrastructure components (execution time, bytes
stored, query complexity, backup size, etc.), meter it accurately,
and handle failure scenarios like backfills and meter resets. I was
frustrated that no standard exists to meter cloud infrastructure,
and we had to do this on our own. Usage metering requires
accurately processing large volumes of events in real-time to power
billing use cases and modern data-intensive applications. Imagine
you want to meter and bill workload execution on a per-second
granularity or meter the number of API calls you make to a third
party and act instantly on events like a user hitting a billing
threshold. The real-time aspect requires instant aggregations and
queries; scalability means to able to ingest and process millions
of usage events per second; it must be accurate--billing requires
precise metering; and it must be fault tolerant, with built-in
idempotency, event backfills, and meter resets. This is
challenging to build out, and the obvious approaches don't work
well: writing to a database for each usage event is expensive;
monitoring systems are cheaper but inaccurate and lack idempotency
(distributed systems use at-least-once delivery); batch processing
in the data warehouse has unacceptable latency. Companies also
need to extract usage data from cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes,
AWS, etc.), vendors (OpenAI, Twilio, etc.), and hardware components
to attribute metered usage to their customers. Collecting usage in
many cases requires writing custom code like measuring execution
duration, listening to lifecycle events, scraping APIs
periodically, parsing log streams, and attributing usage of shared
and multi-tenant resources. OpenMeter leverages stream processing
to be able to update meters in real-time while processing large
volumes of events simultaneously. The core is written in Go and
uses the CloudEvents format to describe usage, Kafka to ingest
events, and ksqlDB to dedupe and aggregate meters. We are also
working on a Postgres sink for long-term storage. Check out our
GitHub to learn more: https://github.com/openmeterio/openmeter
Other companies in the usage-based billing space are focused on
payments and basically want to be Stripe replacements. With
OpenMeter, we're focusing instead on the engineering challenge of
collecting usage data from cloud infrastructure and balancing
tradeoffs between cost, scale, accuracy, and staleness. We're not
trying to be a payment platform--rather, we want to empower
engineers to provide fresh and accurate usage data to Product,
Sales, and Finance, helping them with billing, analytics, and
revenue use cases. We're building OpenMeter as an open-source
project (Apache 2.0), with the goal of making it the standard to
collect and share usage across many solutions and providers. In the
future, we'll offer a hosted / cloud version of OpenMeter with high
availability guarantees and easy integrations to payment, CRM, and
analytics solutions. What usage metering issues or experiences do
you have? We would love to hear your feedback on OpenMeter and to
learn from which sources you need to extract usage and how the
metered data is leveraged. Looking forward to your comments!
Author : hekike
Score : 114 points
Date : 2023-06-22 12:19 UTC (10 hours ago)
| debarshri wrote:
| Slightly distracting question and because I am very curious. Why
| did you decide to opensource the project? What is the benefit
| that you get in your GTM by opensourcing your project. Don't you
| think it is a bit more of a headache to create and manage a
| community around the project. Document, manage external user
| changes etc.
| hekike wrote:
| Great question. It has two components for OpenMeter: 1. My
| personal frustration when I had to do usage-metering at Stripe
| and wanting to have a standard for it, like how we have it for
| metrics. I also find it silly that every company trying to
| figure this out on their own. 2. We want to build usage
| collectors for common cloud components and third-party APIs and
| I think it's going to be easier to do it together as a
| community instead of working in silos.
|
| But yes I agree, it's more challenging to build in open but I
| think it benefits the customer, the quality has to be there.
| mirchiseth wrote:
| At the risk of sounding old - this is called mediation part of
| the usage based billing in the Telecom/Utility billing, which
| happen to be the OG of usage based billing with millions of
| record. I have worked with Digital Route for this in the past.
| Definitely good to see newer architectures and thinking applied
| to this problem for newer use cases. Godspeed to OpenMeter.
| mercurialsolo wrote:
| I would love to see a wrapper around all API calls which is
| metered by default. Showing usage and meters which you can set at
| a per-integration level, per-user, per-key, per-function level.
|
| Congrats on launching this, there's lots of ways to deal with
| this, but would love a metering standard much like we have one
| around tracing.
| hekike wrote:
| I like the idea of meter all primary business executions by
| default and pick what you want to use later. This is useful if
| you want to do cost analysis, iterate on pricing, etc.
|
| Would you track API calls by default like a usage-based third-
| party (OpenAI API, Twilio, etc.)? Or your own web server
| (Lambda, Next.js etc)? Or both.
| mercurialsolo wrote:
| We do both, services as well as a mix of serverless and on-
| demand servers we spin up. I would also like this to have the
| SaaS usage sprawl bundled into this, e.g. emails, notifs, and
| SaaS tools with expanding usage tiers,
| hekike wrote:
| Cool, thanks for sharing it. Would you use SaaS usage for
| cost analysis or to charge your own customers for shared
| resources?
| runlevel1 wrote:
| Metering is such a PIA to implement properly, and the cost of
| getting it wrong is super steep: Lost revenue or, worse,
| overbilling. Love the idea of this project, and I'm liking what I
| see so far!
| hekike wrote:
| Thank you. Do you have learnings or use-case you can share and
| you want to see OpenMeter to cover?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Your discord link is invalid. "undefined" I assume is from a JS
| error.
| hekike wrote:
| Thanks for letting us know! We fixed it, also here is the link
| to join: https://discord.com/invite/nYH3ZQ3Xzq See you on
| Discord ;)
| methodical wrote:
| This isn't a ding against the product or idea and is likely
| something you're looking to improve in the long term, but the
| graphics on the marketing site just feel like visual sugar and
| don't convey any information. This may be just me but I
| frequently just go through a marketing site's graphics as a way
| to grasp high level details of the company and product, but the
| graphics on your marketing site feel like random geometrical
| placeholder images with different layouts, as opposed to anything
| that actually complements the information written in text next to
| them. Again, this is a minor gripe, and something that probably
| was already going to be addressed long term. The product sounds
| interesting and I look forward to taking a deeper dive into the
| open source side of it later!
| hekike wrote:
| Thank you for the honest feedback on the landing, appreciate
| it. Yes, we should make it more informative. Maybe docs is more
| useful in the meantime: https://openmeter.io/docs
| lharries wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! If I understand it right you're
| interested in collecting this usage data both to bill external
| clients but also to much more granularly understand the infra
| costs of a particular feature/product/team? Very cool. Do you
| have any good examples of the internal usage one? How much do big
| companies actually care about this?
| hekike wrote:
| You can find the architecture diagram here:
| https://openmeter.io/docs Decisions:
| https://github.com/openmeterio/openmeter/tree/main/docs/deci...
| [deleted]
| mrkurt wrote:
| We're neck deep in figuring out usage based billing for Fly.io.
| What we're doing is pretty extreme, and may not be representative
| of many other people, but it feels like no one's really solved
| this in a way that makes sense for us.
|
| We run millions of tiny VMs. Each gets billed on a number of
| dimensions: egress, runtime (per cpu / memory combo), storage /
| io. We also have other metered services: ssl certificates, IP
| addresses, etc.
|
| The thing is, we _already_ have metrics for everything we want to
| bill. They're in a time series DB (VictoriaMetrics, in this
| case). Sending a shit ton of events to yet-another-system is
| complicated and brittle.
|
| Your k8s pods example is a good source of my hives. Anything that
| runs on a timer to fire off events is going to get bogged down
| and lose data at our scale. And we're not very big!
|
| This is a somewhat solved problem for metrics stacks. It's
| relatively straightforward to scale metrics scrapes. And once we
| have that infra, it's pretty easy to just start pushing "events"
| to it when events become useful. We don't end up needing Kafka
| and its complexity.
|
| My dream for billing is: a query layer on top of a time series
| database that takes data I already have and turns it into
| invoices.
|
| One thing about your post that struck me - the last mile to
| billing and reporting is the thing we're most interesting in
| buying. It's less specialized. There also aren't any products out
| there that have really figured this out, I don't think (we've
| evaluated pretty much all of them).
|
| Usage tracking and reporting is a thing we're ok building,
| because it's core to our product.
| johndbritton wrote:
| A couple things to check out if you haven't already seen them:
|
| * Lago - https://www.getlago.com
|
| * Octane - https://www.getoctane.io
|
| * Metronome - https://metronome.com
| hekike wrote:
| Those are all solid products for billing. Tough none of them
| are both open-source and have the scalability of streaming
| aggregation. Even Lago is AGPL which can be challenging for
| some.
| strawberrysauce wrote:
| We at zenskar.com are building a billing platform that can plug
| into your metering store (in addition to the traditional api
| way) and generate invoices for your customers. We have a query
| layer that can be used to define aggregates that in turn can be
| used to create invoices. I will reach out to you on email to
| see if we can solve your problems.
| eob wrote:
| +1 to this from the Steamship perspective.
|
| We're a hosting platform for AI Agents and in practice that
| means keeping track of a stream of usage events across agents,
| microservices (equivalent of Fly's VMs), and third-party
| services (OpenAI, Eleven Labs, D-ID, Pinecone, Replicated, etc)
| that roll up into an itemized consumption bill.
|
| It might be this is just a super-niche billing situation, but
| we also haven't yet found an open-source solution that fits.
| Fully agree that a query layer atop a time-series database is
| the style of product that we're craving.
|
| Metronome comes very close, but since it's not open source
| we're hesitant to make the jump before it's a perfect fit.
|
| Congrats on the launch! It looks very cool!
| hekike wrote:
| That's a great insight, thanks for sharing. Would it be the
| ideal solution code / config driven, something like: SELECT
| user, SUM(runtime) FROM usage => invoice_template(Z) Wdyt?
|
| Btw how do you handle idempotency with time series? I think
| replays and least-once delivery in distributed systems can be
| challenging around usage collection if you don't have a key to
| deduplicate by.
| mrkurt wrote:
| I may not be interpreting your question right, but most of
| our metrics are counters. It doesn't matter how often they
| get scraped, or if they get scraped twice, because we only
| care about the increase. Almost everything we track is
| aggregated with `increase()`: https://prometheus.io/docs/prom
| etheus/latest/querying/functi...
|
| I'm fond of SQL, but I'd be ok with some other way to express
| "aggregate my usage into an invoice".
| andrastoth wrote:
| Have you encountered any challenges related to metric
| aggregation? To the best of my understanding, such issues
| often stem from inherent inaccuracies due to sampling
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Ulrq6DxwA&t=175s). I'm
| curious if using a smaller window for metric aggregation
| and routing these events to a stream aggregator could
| provide a possible solution.
| mrkurt wrote:
| Not really, but we might've just implicitly designed
| around it.
|
| Continuously aggregating smaller windows and sending them
| off is roughly how we send usage to Stripe right now
| (which, let's be clear, is not working for us AT ALL).
| We've resigned ourselves to having to do the same thing
| if we want to use a billing SaaS, but I don't love it.
| ylere wrote:
| Fixing the missing links in the billing chain is what we have
| been working on at Wingback (https://wingback.com). Agree that
| the actual metering part is not that hard to get (and having a
| standard here would be great!), but using it to correctly
| enforce entitlements in your product and accurately bill your
| customers who might be on all kind of different plans, models
| prices and discounts over a large number of metered (and
| umetered) features is.
| [deleted]
| nylonstrung wrote:
| What does this do that cannot be accomplished with the other YC
| open source billing tools- Lago and lotus
| hekike wrote:
| It depends on your use-case. On a higher-level OpenMeter
| focuses on the data challenge to collecting usage data from
| infrastructure components on scale, and providing aggregated
| meters real-time. The other platforms you mentioned focuses
| more on billing with some metering component. For example Lago
| looks like writes all events to a relational database first
| than aggregates usage at query time when they do billing.
| Metering with a database has some limitation when it comes to
| scale or when you need to monitor meteres real-time and trigger
| actions based on them. I can see for example some combining
| OpenMeter with other billing platforms to have a scalable
| usage-based billing.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-22 23:00 UTC)