How You.com Scaled AI/API monetization via Usage Based Billing and Product Observability

Overview

By leveraging Moesif, You.com launched a usage-based billing program for their Search and RAG APIs in just a few days, which helped them unlock new revenue streams for their APIs. Furthermore, with Moesif’s full suite of monetization tooling, such as our open-source developer portal, subscription management, and embedded dashboards, You.com was able to provide a winning developer experience that its customers love.

Challenge

With the launch of their suite of AI APIs, You.com sought a solution to monetize their services with usage-based billing. Building an in-house system or relying on disparate tools would have been complex and time-consuming. They also needed to implement safeguards against cost overruns due to unintentional or intentional abuse.

Although You.com was already a Stripe customer, Stripe lacked support for pay-as-you-go (PAYG) billing, which is critical for AI APIs with high inference costs.

Moesif was invaluable in the launch of our API offerings. Moesif handled key aspects of monetization, including implementation of usage-based pricing and opportunity alerting.

Bryan McCann, CTO

Solution

To address these challenges, You.com turned to Moesif, a Stripe partner. Moesif's API monetization platform provided essential features, including usage-based billing, subscription management, developer onboarding, and multi-channel billing.

With Moesif's billing meters, You.com could accurately and easily measure API usage for # of API Calls, Input Tokens, and Output Tokens. They also leveraged Moesif governance rules to enforce quotas ensuring their own AI costs didn't balloon and customers stay within the agreed contract terms.

You.com shipped a custom developer experience at api.you.com powered by Moesif’s open-source developer portal. The developer portal streamlines the process of getting started with a subscription, while also handling the API key generation. Within the developer portal, you.com’s customers gain key visibility into their API consumption and API logs with Moesif’s embeddable dashboards.

As You.com's API products continue to ramp up, their team wanted to expand their reach beyond direct sales and work with third-party channels, such as AWS Marketplace. Moesif's billing solution, with its channel-agnostic approach, made it incredibly easy for You.com to break into new markets and capture new revenue streams.