From the Blog

Thoughts on billing infrastructure, usage-based pricing, and building for AI startups.

Inching towards a software factory

How we've been getting our codebase, tests and infra to keep up with model improvements, so cloud agents can actually do useful work on their own.
John September 9, 2026
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Weekly pricing experiments across billions of credits at Firecrawl

Firecrawl replaced an 800-line SQL function and a decision between smart upgrades and top-ups with a billing system they can iterate on weekly.
Ayush September 3, 2026
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Hunting down memory leaks (in Bun)

How we tracked down a stack of memory leaks in our Bun production server — and recycled what we couldn't fix.
John, Autumn Co-Founder August 29, 2026
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How Mintlify is scaling sales-led GTM

Mintlify moved from product-led to sales-led growth, and had to rebuild billing and provisioning to keep up. Here's how they combined billing and enablement into one model.
Ayush July 29, 2026
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Reworking our positioning

We built Autumn around React hooks and shadcn components for the developer experience. Here's why we're deprecating them, and how our positioning shifted as coding agents got better.
Ayush July 29, 2026
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How to build a credit ledger that scales

Metering token usage needs a different type of infrastructure. This article is about how to build a counter and ledger that works at high throughput and concurrency.
Ayush July 16, 2026
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Building an API for agents

Some patterns we've found ourselves adopting as we design Autumn's API increasingly for agents instead of humans.
John July 8, 2026
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How to build a flexible billing system

How to architect a flexible billing system that handles pricing changes well
John June 16, 2026
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Saying goodbye to multi-region (for now)

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.
John June 8, 2026
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Building on top of 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.
John June 1, 2026
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How we use agents for billing support

How we automated customer support investigations by structuring our logs and giving Claude Code the right primitives.
John May 27, 2026
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Making internal agents useful

John May 21, 2026
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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.
John April 20, 2026
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Post mortem: database outage

Post-mortem write up of an outage that affected a number of requests between 15:00 and 16:00 UTC, 15th March 2026.
Ayush March 15, 2026
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The psychology behind T3 Chat's pricing

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.
Ayush February 20, 2026
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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.
Ayush February 18, 2026
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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.
Ayush January 26, 2026
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React vs shadcn, and trying to be too clever

Learnings about building a component library for a billing platform for AI companies
Ayush June 30, 2025
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Marketing is hard

A little write up on our thoughts and exploration around how to market our developer tool for billing and payments.
Ayush June 17, 2025
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100 stripe cases in 1 endpoint

Handling stripes upgrades, downgrades, schedules, one off and subscriptions all in 1 endpoint.
Ayush June 11, 2025
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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.
Ayush June 2, 2025
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Embedded UI components

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.
John May 28, 2025
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A roasting from HN makes better devtools

Ayush May 20, 2025
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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.
Ayush May 13, 2025
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How we made our first sale as a startup

How we generated our first revenue as a startup, and got into Y Combinator.
Ayush January 23, 2025
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Talking about billing with 30 YC founders

Ayush January 22, 2025
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