# What Generates Charges

Revenium platform charges are based on the volume of metered transactions your application generates. This is different from AI provider spend, which is the cost you pay OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Google, or another provider. This page explains what creates a Revenium transaction so finance and product teams can predict billing volume and explain charges.

There are three categories of billable activity: **AI completions**, **tool registry events**, and **metered product usage for monetization**.

{% hint style="success" %}
**Quick answer:** A Revenium transaction is recorded each time your application sends a metered event to Revenium: an AI call, a Tool Registry event, or a subscriber's use of a metered product configured for monetization. Viewing data in the Revenium dashboard, configuring alerts, or managing subscribers does **not** generate transactions.
{% endhint %}

***

## AI Completions

Each AI call routed through Revenium's metering creates one transaction. This is the primary source of Revenium billing volume for most customers.

The captured data is used for cost attribution and analytics within each transaction — showing you what your AI usage costs across providers, models, agents, and customers — but the transaction itself is the billing unit.

{% hint style="info" %}
**You only pay for what you send.** Revenium meters events you explicitly route through its SDK or metering API. AI calls that bypass Revenium — for example, direct calls to a provider made without the SDK — are not metered and not charged.
{% endhint %}

### What counts as one completion event?

Each request-response pair with a model is one transaction. If your application makes a single `chat.completions.create` call, that is one metered event. Streaming responses count as one event once the full response is received. Retries count as separate transactions if each retry reaches the model.

***

## Tool Registry Events

[Monitor Agent Tool Usage](/instrument-your-agents/monitor-agent-tool-usage.md) is Revenium's feature for tracking costs that go beyond AI model calls — things like external API calls, third-party data services, MCP servers, or human review steps that your agents invoke. You define each cost source in Revenium, assign it a price, and then your application sends an event each time that tool is used. This is separate from the tool-calling capability built into LLMs; it's a way to capture the full economic footprint of your AI workflows, not just token costs.

Each event sent for a registered tool that has pricing configured creates one transaction.

**A tool registry event creates a transaction only when both conditions are true:**

1. The tool has a pricing element configured (flat rate or tiered).
2. Your application sends an event to the metering API for that tool.

Tools with no pricing configured are tracked for observability but do not generate a transaction. Tools that are disabled are not metered.

***

## Metered Product Usage for Monetization

If you are using Revenium's [monetization features](/monetize-your-ai/create-pricing-models-and-products.md) to bill your own customers, product usage transactions are generated by your subscribers' activity against their subscriptions.

What creates a product usage transaction depends on how your product is priced:

| Pricing model                  | What triggers a transaction          |
| ------------------------------ | ------------------------------------ |
| **Flat subscription**          | Subscription activation / renewal    |
| **Per-call / per-transaction** | Each metered request by a subscriber |

Transactions are only generated for active subscriptions. Subscribers who have not activated a subscription, or whose subscription has expired, do not generate product usage transactions.

***

## What Does Not Generate a Charge

| Activity                                                                  | Charged? |
| ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------- |
| Viewing dashboards, analytics, or logs                                    | No       |
| Configuring alerts, budgets, or cost controls                             | No       |
| Creating or managing subscribers, credentials, or products                | No       |
| AI calls blocked before reaching the model (e.g., by a Cost Control rule) | No       |
| Tool Registry events for tools with no pricing configured                 | No       |
| Tool Registry events for disabled tools                                   | No       |
| Revenium's SDK evaluating a cost control rule                             | No       |

***

## FAQ

<details>

<summary>Is there a charge if my AI call fails?</summary>

It depends on where the failure occurs. If a Cost Control rule blocks the request before it reaches the model, no transaction is recorded and no charge is incurred. If the request reached the model and received a response — even an error response — the event was metered and a transaction is recorded.

</details>

<details>

<summary>I've connected an AI coding assistant like Claude Code or Gemini — what transactions will it generate?</summary>

AI coding assistants that send telemetry to Revenium follow the same model as any other AI completion: each AI call the assistant makes generates one metered transaction. In practice, a single session where a developer asks several questions and runs several tasks will produce multiple transactions — one per model request.

The exact transaction count for a given session depends on how the tool vendor's harness batches and reports events, which is outside Revenium's control. What you can observe is straightforward: each transaction that appears in your [AI Transactions log](/optimize-performance/debug-logs-and-traces.md) represents one AI call that was metered. There are no hidden multipliers or background charges.

For details on connecting specific tools and understanding what data each one reports, see the [AI Assistants Dashboard](/track-and-control-costs/analyze-ai-tooling-spend.md).

</details>

<details>

<summary>If I use multiple providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), does that affect my transaction count?</summary>

Each AI call generates one transaction regardless of which provider handled it. Using multiple providers does not change the transaction count — it affects the cost attribution data captured within each transaction, which you can view broken down by provider in your analytics.

</details>

<details>

<summary>How do I see a breakdown of what I've been charged?</summary>

For a transaction-level breakdown, use the [AI Transactions log](/optimize-performance/debug-logs-and-traces.md), which includes both AI transaction details and product transaction entries.

</details>


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