---
title: "Monetization: margin per customer for the AI you sell"
description: "Metering, credits, entitlements, subscriptions and Stripe billing in one ledger. Every customer event carries what it cost to serve, so margin per customer, per feature and per model comes from the same system that bills. Open source, self-hosted."
date: 2026-08-26
canonical: https://tansohq.com/product/monetization
---

# Monetization: the AI you sell

Every customer event carries what it cost to serve.

Billing tools don't know your costs. Observability tools don't bill. Tanso records both on the same event, so two customers on the same plan with opposite margins stop looking identical.

## What you get

- **Metering.** Idempotent usage events that carry tokens, model, provider and cost next to what was billed. Costs and revenue land in one ledger.
- **Margin analytics.** MRR, inference cost and margin per customer, per feature and per model, with churn risk on the accounts that lose you money.
- **Entitlements.** Allow or deny in your request path. Usage caps and credit limits apply when the event is ingested, not at invoice time. Checks fail closed.
- **Credits.** Pools per customer, grants with expiry, FIFO draw-down, and an append-only ledger you can audit to the unit.
- **Two pricing dials.** How many credits an action burns is the weight table. What a credit costs to buy is the price book. Both are effective-dated and edited from the console, and past usage is never repriced.
- **Subscriptions and billing.** Plans, proration, invoices and cycle rollover. Stripe is the optional payment adapter, and billing state lives in Tanso.

![Overview: margin per customer and per model](https://tansohq.com/screenshots/console-overview.png)

## Take this half, leave the rest

Runs without internal spend. Set `APP_MODULES_BUILD_ENABLED=false` and the vendor connectors, spend reports and their hourly jobs are switched off; the console shows Monetization alone. Turn it on later without reinstalling.

## Adoption

No migration. Deploy Tanso beside your stack and send it usage events. Cost lands next to revenue and you get margin per customer without changing checkout. Later, if you want, let Tanso run plans, entitlements and invoicing for everyone. Each step is optional.

## Also in Tanso

- [Internal spend](https://tansohq.com/product/internal-spend.md)
- [Agent-serve](https://tansohq.com/product/agent-serve.md)
- [Margin Analyzer](https://tansohq.com/margin-analyzer.md)

Code: https://github.com/tansohq/tanso-oss · Docs: https://tanso.mintlify.app