Rate card (usage-based billing)
A rate card is the published list of prices a company charges for metered usage — broken out by billable unit, such as per token, per API call, or per seat, and often tiered by volume — that governs how a usage-based invoice is calculated.
What a rate card defines
A rate card specifies, for each billable metric, the price per unit and any conditions that change that price — volume tiers, committed-use discounts, per-customer overrides, or time-bound promotional rates. It is the pricing configuration a billing engine reads at invoice time to convert raw usage into a dollar amount.
Rate cards commonly use one of a few tier structures: flat (one price regardless of volume), graduated or tiered (each unit priced at the rate of the tier it falls in), or volume (the entire quantity re-priced at the tier the total volume reaches). The structure chosen changes how a customer's bill grows as usage increases.
| Tier | Monthly usage range | Price per 1M tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | 0 – 10M tokens | $5.00 |
| Tier 2 | 10M – 100M tokens | $4.00 |
| Tier 3 | 100M+ tokens | $3.00 |
Why rate cards need to stay in sync with vendor cost
A rate card is only profitable if it stays ahead of the underlying vendor cost it is built on. When a model vendor changes its own pricing and a company's customer-facing rate card is not updated to match, the spread between cost and price narrows or inverts — a common source of margin leakage.