01
Usage left telecom
Your rating engine sees minutes and messages. It does not see entries, inferences, pages or machine hours — and those are the lines your customers now question.
Usage billing for vCons · hosted service · release 0.1
Bill anything
expressible
as a vCon.
A door opening. An AI inference. Forty-two minutes of forklift runtime. Send us the vCon; we work out who owes for it, price it, charge it, and hand back a signed receipt you can put in front of a customer six months later.
door entry/ai inference/voice minute/forklift runtime/document analysis/message delivered/data egress/sensor hour/
One vCon in, one priced charge out.
Illustrative data
What happened
What we work out
What lands on the bill
Charged
POSTED · 1 CHARGE
Revenue escaped the rating engine.
02
Every vendor invents a log
Each new usage source arrives with its own CSV, webhook or database view. Integration cost scales with vendor count, and none of it is signed.
03
Record and charge diverge
Evidence of what happened lives in one system, the charge in another. Six months later nobody can reconstruct the decision that produced the amount.
Six stages. The order is load-bearing.
Canonicalize before hashing. Resolve identity before pricing. Freeze pricing before authorizing. Authorize before accounting.
The format doesn't care what the event was.
Anything whose usage reduces to a quantity or a session can be expressed, submitted and rated. The gateway treats them identically.
| Event | Source | Unit | Qty | Rate code | Mode |
|---|
Billing Handles
A handle is whatever your source can actually assert: a fob ID, an agent name, an extension, a vehicle tag. It is not an account number, and it should not have to be.
Resolution walks a time-bound graph from that handle to the account that pays. Every edge carries a validity window, so a fob reassigned in March still charges the tenant who held it in February.
cst234_fob:F0B-8842 └─ fob → asset valid 2026-01-04 → open └─ asset → site valid 2025-11-20 → open └─ site → account valid 2025-11-20 → open → Customer 234 / Account 1000456
Resolved at event time, not submission time. The path is stored with the operation and replayed on dispute.
Rules that hold when things go wrong.
Billing systems are judged on their failure modes. These are ours, stated before you ask.
You send vCons. We do the billing.
One endpoint. No middleware to run, no shadow ledger to reconcile. Your rate plans stay yours — we price against them and give the charge back to you with the evidence attached.
- Input
- vCon core draft-03, signed
- Interface
- HTTPS, one submit call
- Output
- Priced charge + receipt vCon
- Pricing
- Your rate plans, unchanged
- Retention
- Replayable operation record
Build status · release 0.1
We're looking for four design partners.
Release 0.1 is a working prototype, not a product you can buy yet. Partners run it against a sandbox with their own rate plans, and their usage source is what we build an adapter for first.