Usage Metering & Billing Pipeline · View 01 of 22 · Context and scope
Decisions
- The boundary ends at an issued invoice. Payment capture, dunning, tax determination and revenue recognition are consumers, not components — they each have an owner already, and absorbing them would make this platform the single point of failure for cash collection.
- Producers hand off asynchronously and never wait on the billing path. The one exception is the cap decision, which is why it appears on the diagram as a separate arrow back out.
- Partner and batch feeds enter through the same contract as product services, so there is one validation and deduplication path rather than a privileged side door.
Assumptions
- 1.5 million billable accounts and 400 distinct meters (stated assumption).
- 250,000 events/s steady state per region, 5× burst for 10 minutes (stated assumption).
- Three downstream financial systems, each able to accept a replayed invoice idempotently.
Omitted
- Internal operators — the billing engineer and the pricing manager appear in view 03 and in the privileged zone of view 20, not here.
- The nightly warehouse extract: it is a read of the same ledger the evidence query uses.
