Request: Can we get an example of how to use the new usage billing feature

[wanjohiryan]

Hello there 👋🏾

Maybe am too early to be trying to implement this 😅, but I really need it as am shipping a more comprehensive billing to our project

I have been looking at the docs and am more confused about everything:

• What is aggregation? What is the difference between all the options - count, sum, max, min and avg ?
• Can we add multiple filters and how will that work?
• Can we create custom ingestion events? And how do we do that?

A simple solution would be to build a simple example using this...

Thank you in advance :D

[frankie567]

We'll probably need to improve the docs but in a nutshell:

Your application sends Events to our API. Typically, an event reflects some usage done by a customer in your app. For example:

• They made a request to an LLM
• They streamed N minutes of video
• They uploaded N kilobytes of data to your server
• ...

You are free to use any name you want and add any metadata to the event as you see fit. If I take the upload example, it could be:

{
    "name": "file_uploaded"
    "external_customer_id": "USER_ID"
    "metadata": {"bytes": 1024}
}

---

On Polar's side, you can then configure Meters. Those meters are responsible for:

1. Filtering Events. For example, you can query for Events whose name equals file_uploaded. And yes, you can have multiple conditions to your filter, with AND or OR operator. You can filter on metadata too.
2. Aggregating Events. This is how you want to calculate the number of units consumed. In the file_uploaded example, it would typically be the sum of the metadata bytes. It means we want to bill the customer for the sum of all the bytes they uploaded to the server.

With the same example, other aggregations would do this:

• Count: we bill the customer for the number of times they uploaded a file
• Average: we bill the customer for the average number of bytes they uploaded
• Max: we bill the customer for the largest file they uploaded
• Min: we bill the customer for the smallest file they uploaded

Of course, depending on the use-case, some aggregations may not really make sense (like here with Min and Max).