usage-based-pricing

usage-based-pricing is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jonathimer/devmarketing-skills. It costs 55 tokens per session (3,260 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for designing pricing that changes with customer usage, such as API requests, messages, or computing time. It focuses on metrics developers can understand and estimate before buying.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design API pricing, metered billing, pay-as-you-go plans, pricing pages, and cost calculators.
Why use it?
It helps avoid confusing bills and unexpected costs by connecting prices to clear units of use. It also explains how usage pricing can fit with a free tier.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jonathimer/devmarketing-skills/usage-based-pricing
Any agent
npx skills add jonathimer/devmarketing-skills --skill usage-based-pricing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jonathimer/devmarketing-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for usage-based-pricing

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jonathimer/devmarketing-skills/usage-based-pricing.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jonathimer/devmarketing-skills/usage-based-pricing)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jonathimer/devmarketing-skills/usage-based-pricing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jonathimer/devmarketing-skills/usage-based-pricing.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,260 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00055 $0.03260
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.01630
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00652
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00326

Measured 4d ago against content hash 0c5db3bea5c9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

usage-based-pricing scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl https://api.example.com/usage \
skills/usage-based-pricing/SKILL.md · 537 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 537 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Usage-Based Pricing

Design pricing models that developers understand, accept, and can predict—without surprise bills or confusing metrics.

Overview

Developers are uniquely sensitive to pricing. They'll calculate unit economics, compare alternatives, and write blog posts about surprise bills. Usage-based pricing works well for developer tools because it aligns cost with value, but it can also create anxiety about unpredictable costs.

The best developer pricing is predictable, transparent, and obviously fair. Developers should be able to estimate their bill before they commit.

Before You Start

Review the /devmarketing-skills/skills/free-tier-strategy skill to understand how free tiers connect to paid pricing. Your pricing model should feel like a natural extension of the free tier, not a completely different experience.

Usage Metrics Developers Accept

Good Metrics: Direct Value Correlation

API calls/requests

  • Developers understand what triggers a call
  • Easy to monitor and predict
  • Scales with actual usage
  • Example: Stripe charges per transaction, Twilio per message

Compute time

  • Clear relationship to server costs
  • Predictable for consistent workloads
  • Fair for variable workloads
  • Example: AWS Lambda per GB-second, Vercel build minutes

Storage

  • Simple to understand
  • Easy to predict growth
  • Clear cost driver
  • Example: S3 per GB stored, databases per GB

Bandwidth/data transfer

  • Makes sense for CDN and hosting
  • Can be surprising if not monitored
  • Example: Cloudflare per GB, Vercel bandwidth

Active users (MAU)

  • Works for auth and user-facing tools
  • Aligns with customer's growth
  • Example: Auth0, Firebase Auth

Problematic Metrics

"Compute units" or proprietary measures

Bad: "1 CU = 0.25 CPU seconds at 1.5GHz equivalent with 256MB memory allocation"
Developers can't estimate usage.

Compound metrics

Bad: "Charged per operation, where operation = read OR write OR delete,
     multiplied by document size factor"
Too complex to predict.

Read the full file on GitHub · 537 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 537 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 0c5db3bea5c9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

usage-based-pricing is a skill published in the GitHub repository jonathimer/devmarketing-skills (86 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 3,260 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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