From the Blog
Thoughts on billing infrastructure, usage-based pricing, and building for AI startups.
Stop rebuilding your billing system
How to architect a flexible billing system that handles pricing changes well
Active-active fixed our counters and broke everything else
Why we moved Autumn to a multi-region architecture, the tradeoffs we hit with active-active Redis, and why we eventually returned to a simpler single-region setup.
We built a billing company but didn't replace Stripe Billing
Why Autumn builds around Stripe Billing instead of replacing subscriptions and invoices, and where the real complexity has moved for credit-based pricing.
Building an AI agent to automatically investigate support tickets
How we automated customer support investigations by structuring our logs and giving Claude Code the right primitives.
Internal agents are actually useful when you give them the right primitives
Migrating Autumn to PlanetScale
How we migrated our core database to PlanetScale, and why it's been a game-changer for performance, reliability, and developer experience.
Post-mortem: Database outage caused by collation migration locking conflict
Post-mortem write up of an outage that affected a number of requests between 15:00 and 16:00 UTC, 15th March 2026.
Consumer psychology is important in AI pricing (feat. T3 chat)
We worked with Theo and Mark from T3 Chat to build a cool new way of pricing. We learned about the psychology behind how AI products are consumed, and what that means for how we should monetize them.
We're making some API changes
A bit of context about what will be changing in the new version of the Autumn API and SDK.
People really don't like metered billing
Replit’s 2026 pricing shift highlights three trends in AI-first products: usage-based billing creates anxiety, seats don’t map to AI value, and credits/effort-based pricing reduce transparency as agents run longer.
React vs shadcn, and trying to be too clever
Learnings about building a component library for a billing platform for AI companies
Marketing is hard
A little write up on our thoughts and exploration around how to market our developer tool for billing and payments.
Architecture to run 100 stripe cases in 1 endpoint
Handling stripes upgrades, downgrades, schedules, one off and subscriptions all in 1 endpoint.
What if Stripe builds this
Stripe has been the go-to for billing, subscriptions and managing payment logic for 16 years. We think that'll change soon.
Embedded UI components are easier with shadcn
We decided to use a shadcn/ui registry to set up our pricing components, instead of a Reactjs library. We used this approach for pricing pages, upgrade and downgrade flows and paywalls.
A roasting from HN makes better devtools
We tried to make billing backendless
We wanted to make payments, billing, usage limits and tracking as easy as possible. We explored a billing integration that required no backend setup, but ultimately gave up.
How we made our first sale as a startup
How we generated our first revenue as a startup, and got into Y Combinator.
