Credyt
Real-time billing, built for AI
Details
- External ID
- 46808714
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Credyt
- Website domain
- credyt.ai
- Launched
- Jan. 29, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.09617918313570488
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hey HN! I'm the founder of Credyt (https://credyt.ai).If you're running an AI product that burns $0.50+ per interaction, you need to bill customers as usage happens, not at the end of the month. Otherwise you're a bank for your customers, and you'll run out of money before they do.Why invoice-based billing doesn't work for AI:Most usage-based billing tools (Stripe Billing, Orb, etc.) were built for SaaS. They meter usage all month, then send an invoice. That works fine when your COGS is 5%. It's a disaster when you're paying your AI vendor upfront for every request and your margins are 15-30%.If a power user runs up $10K in costs and churns or their card declines at month-end, you've just eaten $10K. We've seen multiple startups nearly run out of runway because of this."Just build a wallet in Postgres" – harder than it sounds:Everyone starts there. Track a balance, decrement on usage, done. Then you hit race conditions when usage spikes, auto-top-up logic that needs to be bulletproof, credit grants with expiry dates and priority rules, pricing versioning (customer X is on v1 rates, customer Y on v2, customer Z has a custom deal), profitability analysis (what did this customer cost us vs. what we charged them?), refunds, disputes, partial credits, reserves...Three months later you've hacked together a billing system instead of building your product.What Credyt does:It's a wallet-native billing engine. Your customers get a balance (in USD, credits, tokens, minutes, whatever you want), you send usage events as they happen, and Credyt handles the debiting, auto-top-ups via Stripe, and gives you an embeddable billing portal.We match against your pricing rules (which you can version and test before publishing), debit the wallet atomically, trigger top-ups via Stripe when they hit their threshold, and give you a hosted billing portal so you're not building balance UIs.Unlike tools that only track revenue, Credyt lets you log both what you charged and what it cost you. So you can see margins per customer, per product, per pricing tier—in real-time. Most founders are shocked when they realize their most active users are unprofitable.Docs: https://docs.credyt.aiQuickstart video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48XJlId7098Pricing: Free to start, then $1/month per active wallet. No processing markup—Stripe fees pass through directly.We're still early stage and genuinely want feedback from people in the trenches:What would stop you from ripping out your current system for this?What's missing that would make this production-ready for you?If you tried to build wallets yourself, where did it break?
Enrichment
- Theme
- payments, billing, and wallet infrastructure
- Vertical
- Fintech
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- real-time billing for ai
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While basic billing dashboards and Stripe wrappers are easy, high-throughput sub-millisecond credit deduction and wallet locking to prevent overages in AI apps require complex real-time distributed state management.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires high-throughput real-time metering agents (often deployed via proxies or sidecars), an ultra-low-latency in-memory state store (Redis/Dragonfly with Lua scripts) for wallet balance deductions, and a persistent ledger database. The hard challenge is preventing double-spend or runaway inference costs under concurrent multi-agent requests without degrading API response latency. This requires distributed systems and financial ledger engineering expertise.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 232 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #227 of 233 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 86 days after the earliest competitor.
- A customer billing portal built to reduce "can you resend the invoice? · hn · 2026-02-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- BillingHub · ph · 2026-09-29 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Laravel SaaS Billing Engine · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- SparkPay · ph · 2026-09-24 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Custom Pricing Units in Flexprice (price in credits, bill in USD) · hn · 2026-02-12 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- We built an open source, zero webhooks payment processor · hn · 2025-11-25 · 405 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Stripe-no-webhooks · hn · 2026-02-10 · 66 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Femail · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.