AI moves fast: new models, new pricing, new capabilities, sometimes all at once. Prepaid credits let customers buy value upfront and spend it across whatever you're offering today or launch next, without needing to reprice, remigrate, or renegotiate every time something changes.
Prepaid credits are now available in Kong Konnect Metering & Billing. It’s a major piece of the AI cost control and monetization puzzle, and changes how organizations can structure financial risk around usage-based products.
***Available now: ****Explore the *[_*docs*_](https://developer.konghq.com/metering-and-billing/)_*docs*_* or view *[_*Konnect pricing to get started*_](https://konghq.com/pricing)_*Konnect pricing to get started*_.
Before we jump into prepaid credits, let’s review the basics. The two terms, tokens and credits, sometimes get used interchangeably in the space, so it’s worth untangling.
Tokens are what you meter, credits are what you monetize, and the gap between what you pay your model provider and what you charge your customers is exactly where your margin lives.
AI companies built on top of hosted models face the same reality of when a customer or internal team burns tokens… there is a real bill on the other side that the financial team now has to settle. You’re paying OpenAI, Anthropic, or another provider, per token, in real time.
Post-pay billing is fine when consumption is predictable, but that’s not always the case with AI related charges. Usage can spike overnight. An agentic workflow can run away before someone notices. The latest model drops, customers run to test it, and suddenly your finance team is swimming in the bill. If you’ve ever had to explain those numbers to your CFO, you already know the problem, and if you haven’t yet but plan to, check out our guide on [*How to Talk to Your CFO About AI Gateway Metrics Without Losing Them in the First Slide*](https://konghq.com/blog/enterprise/cfo-guide-ai-gateway-metrics)*How to Talk to Your CFO About AI Gateway Metrics Without Losing Them in the First Slide**.*
Prepaid credits help with these runaway bills. Instead of waiting to see what a customer owes you, you receive funds upfront and customers draw down against a balance. You’re financially protected when the consumption starts. And because new AI models ship constantly, a credit balance gives customers the flexibility to apply their existing value across whatever model or capability they’re using next, without requiring a price migration every few weeks.
Prepaid credits in Kong Konnect Metering and Billing works like a balance assigned to each customer, drawing down as they use your product.
**Here’s what you can do with it today:**
Not all credits are the same. Each customer wallet is tied to a specific fiat currency, ensuring all credit grants within it share the same denomination. When creating a credit grant, you choose how that credit is funded and stored in the customer's wallet:
When creating a plan or starting a subscription, you choose how usage gets settled, or how consumption gets converted into a charge. Billing plans are also configured for a specific fiat currency, meaning a subscription will only draw from a customer's wallet if the currencies match.
With drawdown priority, a single customer can hold multiple credit grants simultaneously. Konnect handles the drawdown order automatically in order of promotional and then earliest expiration. You can also assign a number priority to the credit grants, giving you more control over the drawdown order when multiple grants exist.
The financial logic behind Konnect Metering and Billing pre-paid credits is straightforward. If a customer prepays, you’ve already received payment prior to consumption. Even if usage spikes unexpectedly, you’re not floating the bill, but drawing down against money you already have.
On pricing, credits decouple what a customer paid from what they're consuming today, so when a new model ships or token costs shift, their balance applies automatically, with no plan migration and no legacy rate card to maintain.
At the growth layer, promotional credits turn onboarding incentives, loyalty rewards, and spend-based campaigns into configuration, not engineering work.
If your organization is building AI products, running AI agents, or operating any platform where usage and cost are directly coupled, the question is no longer whether you need a metering and billing foundation, it's how quickly you can get one in place.
If you're ready to stop floating receivables and start collecting before consumption, [_get started with Konnect Metering & Billing_](https://konghq.com/products/kong-konnect/features/usage-based-metering-and-billing)_get started with Konnect Metering & Billing_ or [_talk to our team._](https://konghq.com/contact-sales)_talk to our team._
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