hey guys i’m working on a side project where I need to monitor activity on Reddit like specific subreddits + keywords and trigger alerts when something relevant pops up (ik there are aready existing solns but wanted make one for my own, want to add more stuff as i go).
What I didn’t expect was how uneven the usage ends up being. Some people would track one or two things, others would go pretty hard with multiple rules running often. On the dev side that translates to very different costs, more scans, more API calls, more indexing, more notifications.
A flat monthly plan feels wrong because of that, so I’m leaning toward usage-based pricing (credits per scan / rule / alert). The problem is the billing side of things.
Where I’m stuck is the billing side:
- metering usage accurately
- handling credits, overages, and resets
- keeping payments simple without building a billing system from scratch
Curious how others have handled this:
- did you build your own usage tracking or use something else?
- any tools you’d recommend or avoid?
- anything I should do different?