# 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 [Read more](/content/blog/inching-towards-a-software-factory/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/how-firecrawl-runs-pricing-experiments-every-week/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/eliminating-memory-leaks/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/how-mintlify-is-scaling-sales-led-gtm/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/saying-goodbye-to-react-hooks/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/ai-billing-infrastructure/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/building-an-api-for-agents/index.html) ## How to build a flexible billing system How to architect a flexible billing system that handles pricing changes well John June 16, 2026 [Read more](/content/blog/stop-rebuilding-billing/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/active-active-redis-cache/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/we-built-a-billing-company-but-didnt-replace-stripe-billing/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/building-an-ai-agent-to-investigate-support-tickets/index.html) ## Making internal agents useful John May 21, 2026 [Read more](/content/blog/coding-agents-and-abstractions/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/migrating-to-planetscale/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/post-mortem-database-outage-caused-by-collation-migration-locking-conflict/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/working-with-t3-chat-on-a-new-way-of-pricing/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/we-re-making-some-api-changes/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/usage-billing-bad/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/component-fail/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/marketing/index.html) ## 100 stripe cases in 1 endpoint Handling stripes upgrades, downgrades, schedules, one off and subscriptions all in 1 endpoint. Ayush June 11, 2025 [Read more](/content/blog/attach/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/what-if-stripe-builds-this/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/shadcn/index.html) ## A roasting from HN makes better devtools Ayush May 20, 2025 [Read more](/content/blog/thanks-hn/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/backendless/index.html) ## 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 [Read more](/content/blog/how-we-made-our-first-sale-as-a-startup/index.html) ## Talking about billing with 30 YC founders Ayush January 22, 2025 [Read more](/content/blog/talking-about-billing-with-30-yc-founders/index.html)