---
title: Tanso FAQ — Open-Source Billing and Entitlements
description: Common questions about Tanso, the open-source self-hosted billing and entitlement engine for B2B AI products.
date: 2026-07-14
---

# Frequently asked questions

## What is Tanso?

Tanso is an open-source (AGPL-3.0) billing, metering, and entitlement engine
for B2B AI products. You self-host it; there is no hosted version. It gates
features in real time, meters usage with its cost attached, manages credit
pools, and generates invoices, with Stripe as an optional payment adapter.

## What does Tanso do?

Entitlement checks in the request path (allow or deny before compute runs),
idempotent usage events that carry their cost (tokens, model, provider),
credit pools with hard limits, subscription billing with invoices, and
optional Stripe sync. Costs and revenue land in one ledger, so margin per
customer, feature, or model falls out of the same system that bills.

## Who is Tanso for?

Teams selling credits or usage on B2B AI products, where inference costs are
big enough that margin per customer is a real question, and who want their
billing infrastructure on their own servers instead of a third-party black
box.

## What is the AI Pricing Finder?

A free tool from Tanso that breaks down how 80+ AI companies price their
products (pricing model, value metric, overage strategy, and usage
mechanics) so you can filter and compare them side by side. No signup
required.

## Is the AI Pricing Finder free?

Yes. The AI Pricing Finder is free and requires no account. Tanso also
offers a free Margin Analyzer.

## How is Tanso different from Stripe?

Stripe collects payments. Tanso handles everything upstream: which customers
can use which features, how much they have consumed, whether they are within
limits, and what it cost you to serve them. Tanso is the source of truth for
plans, entitlements, and usage; Stripe is the optional payment adapter it
syncs invoices to.

## Does Tanso replace my billing system?

It can be your billing system: plans, entitlements, metering, credits, and
invoicing live in Tanso. If you already collect payments with Stripe, keep
doing that: Tanso syncs invoices to Stripe and Stripe stays your payment
rail.

## How long does it take to set up?

The Docker quickstart starts a seeded instance in minutes. Integration is two
API calls: check an entitlement before serving a request, then report a usage
event after.

## Links

- [Source (AGPL-3.0)](https://github.com/tansohq/tanso-oss)
- [Documentation](https://tanso.mintlify.app)
- [HTML version of this page](https://tansohq.com/faq)