Orange Collective
Autumn

Autumn

The open-source pricing and billing platform for AI-native software.

useautumn.comYYC Profile2.6k@autumnpricingLinkedIn
Autumn Product Demo[2]

Seed

Round

YC S25 · Apache-2.0

30+

YC customers

AI-native cohort default

$32.8B

Billing infra TAM by 2034

From $7.9B in 2024 · ~16% CAGR

In production at

Mintlify

Developer docs · YC W22

Firecrawl

Web data for LLMs · YC S22

Mastra

AI agent framework · YC W25

Browser Use

OSS web agents · YC W25

T3.chat

ChatGPT for power users

Plus 400+ apps integrated in the first four months and growing YC penetration.[1] [2]

Thesis

Stripe Billing was designed for a world where pricing didn't move. Autumn is what billing looks like when every product is metered, every pricing model changes every month, and every developer expects open source by default.[1] [4] The longer-term bet: Autumn becomes the real-time usage database for AI software — the canonical record of who used what, when, for how much. Every billing decision flows through it.
  1. 01

    The seat is dying. Everything is tokens. 85% of surveyed software companies have adopted usage-based pricing, and nearly half of those did it in the last two years.[4] AI workloads scale with tokens, requests, tool calls, and agent runs — not headcount. Salesforce's CEO put it bluntly: per-user products are for humans, consumption products are for agents and robots.[4]

  2. 02

    Stripe gave you billing rails. It didn't give you a pricing engine. Every AI startup ends up rebuilding the same layer above Stripe — checkout flows, usage metering, feature gating, webhook plumbing, plan versioning, grandfathering. When the pricing model changes, the whole apparatus gets ripped out and re-stitched. Autumn is that layer, factored out and open-sourced — three primitives: /attach, /check, /track.[3]

  3. 03

    Coding agents are the new distribution layer. "The sourcing of signups to Vercel from ChatGPT has been growing exponentially."[8] LLMs recommend whatever has the cleanest OSS repo, the simplest DX, and the most-cited blog posts. Apache-2.0 + 2.6k stars + a three-function SDK is exactly the surface coding agents reach for.[3]

  4. 04

    The control plane is the moat, not the SDK. Credits issuance, custom plans per account, plan versioning with grandfathering, rollovers, usage analytics — workflows ops and finance teams use without engineers. SDKs alone don't lock customers in; the dashboard does. Same playbook that turned Vercel + Next.js into a $3B+ business.

Problem

Stripe is low-level. Pricing is high-level. That gap is where every AI startup loses a quarter of an engineer.

Stripe Billing was designed for monthly subscriptions and annual contracts. To do anything in between — credits, overage, mid-cycle plan changes, custom enterprise plans, rollovers — you stitch together five API functions, five brittle webhooks, and a handful of database tables you maintain forever.

AI startups change pricing more often than legacy SaaS companies ship features. A new model lands, the tokens get cheaper, the unit economics shift, the pricing page changes by Friday. Every time, the engineering team rips out product/price IDs, migrates active subscriptions, re-checks the webhook handlers, and prays the tax math still reconciles. The cost isn't the migration — it's the chilling effect on how fast the company can experiment with pricing in the first place.

The founders we spoke with had run this loop themselves before adopting Autumn. Two paused in-house billing builds entirely. One had been on Orb and switched because the integration was simpler and the iteration cycle was faster. One picked Autumn because the founders shipped a fix in twenty minutes on a Friday afternoon.[11]

300k+

Stripe Billing companies

~200M active subscriptions on the rails Autumn sits on

78%

of Forbes AI 50 use Stripe

The dense buyer pool sits inside one ecosystem

8×

YoY UBP billings growth

Metronome's 2024 processed volume vs. 2023

Stripe 2024 update[5] · Metronome State of UBP 2025[4]

Why Now

Pricing is moving from per-seat to per-token in front of our eyes.

Three trends are colliding in the same eighteen months: UBP adoption is past tipping, AI is making seat pricing structurally wrong, and coding agents are choosing the OSS billing stack by default.

We have per-user products which are for humans. And we have consumption products, they are for agents and robots.

Marc Benioff

Marc Benioff[4]

CEO · Salesforce

The sourcing of signups to Vercel from ChatGPT has been growing exponentially. People are going directly to their AI buddy to learn about the world.

Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo Rauch[8]

CEO · Vercel

We had a Friday afternoon bug. The Autumn founders shipped a fix in twenty minutes. Value far exceeds what we pay.

RC

OC reference call[11]

AI-native customer · ex-Orb

Three preconditions converged in the same eighteen months.

UBP has crossed the chasm. 85% of software companies have adopted some form of usage-based pricing. 78% of those did it in the last five years; nearly half in the last two.[4] The growth is no longer a curiosity — it's the default shape of new SaaS contracts.

AI makes seat pricing structurally wrong. An AI product's marginal cost is a token, not a seat. Customers pay for outcomes (drafts, support tickets, agents launched), workloads vary 10× across users, and infrastructure costs move every time a new model ships. Per-seat pricing assumes a stable answer to "how much does this cost us to serve you?" — AI products don't get to assume that.

Coding agents now choose the stack. Developers ask ChatGPT how to ship something. ChatGPT recommends whatever has the cleanest OSS repo, the most idiomatic SDK, and the highest signal on Stack Overflow. Vercel won deployment that way. Supabase won Postgres that way. Autumn is winning billing that way — Apache-2.0, three SDK functions, shadcn-style React components, and an LLM-friendly docs surface.[3] [8] [9]

We have per-user products which are for humans. And we have consumption products, they are for agents and robots.
— Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce[4]

How It Works

Three SDK functions. One dashboard. A new pricing plan ships in minutes.

Step 01

/attach — start the purchase

One call to put a customer on a plan, switch them between plans, or add credits, top-ups, or seats. Handles checkout, upgrades, downgrades, proration, and Stripe's webhook spaghetti underneath. Abstracts the part that breaks every time pricing changes.

Step 02

/track — meter what matters

Real-time usage events for tokens, messages, tool calls, agents launched, or anything else. Powers consumption pricing and credits without forcing the team to ship and maintain a metering pipeline of their own.

Step 03

/check — gate at the edge

Enforce limits and paywalls at request time. Returns allow/deny plus overage guidance the client can render directly. The same call drives both quota enforcement and the upsell prompt.

The dashboard is where the moat lives.

Custom plans per account. A sales-led enterprise plan, a champion's special, a YC discount tier — all created and versioned in the dashboard without a code change. The same primitive powers grandfathering when pricing evolves: old customers stay on the plan they signed up for; new ones see the new one.

Credits, rollovers, and overage logic. Issue credits as monetary value or arbitrary units. Roll unused credits forward. Set overage prices per feature. Workflows that would be weeks of webhook glue against raw Stripe ship instantly in Autumn's UI.[3]

React components, TypeScript SDK, shadcn-style. Drop-in pricing tables, paywalls, and upgrade flows. The same components every AI dev tool already uses. The integration story is short enough that a coding agent can finish it.[1]

The Control Plane Is the Moat

The SDK got us in. The dashboard is what keeps us there.

The reference calls all expected to love the developer experience. The surprise was the post-install value — work that ops and finance teams used to bring engineering into Slack to do.

SDKs win the install. Control planes win the renewal.

The reference call pattern. Customers were sold by quick start. They stayed because issuing credits to a frustrated champion, versioning a pricing plan for a quarterly experiment, or stitching together a custom enterprise plan turned into a five-minute job instead of a sprint.[11]

The economic argument. Engineering time is the most expensive line item at every AI-native startup. The companies that moved fastest on pricing were the ones that didn't need to call an engineer to do it. The dashboard turns billing operations into a non-engineering function — and the non-engineering function is what survives the next reorg.

The pricing power upside. Every customer in our reference call said the same thing: "we'd pay more." Autumn is materially underpriced today. Expanded tiers and enterprise SKUs are on the roadmap, and the dashboard primitives are the natural place to charge for it.[11]

We paused our in-house billing build the week we found Autumn. We ship pricing changes in minutes now. Stripe-on-Stripe was never going to work for us.
— OC reference call · AI-native customer[11]

Market

The densest buyer pool is already inside YC.

Stripe Billing serves 300k+ companies and ~200M active subscriptions today — the rails Autumn sits on, and the largest single addressable customer pool in software billing.[5] 78% of the Forbes AI 50 already run Stripe.[5] Inside YC, Autumn is already in production at 30+ companies in the current and recent batches.[2]

The medium-term ICP is every Seed-to-Series B AI-native SaaS company shipping product weekly. They change pricing constantly, can't afford to maintain a billing team, and their CTO is the buyer. Autumn's wedge product is exactly what a YC technical founder ships at week 4 — and the dashboard is what keeps the same customer at week 104.

Near term — AI-native startups

YC current and recent cohorts plus the broader AI-native seed-to-Series-A pool. Dense network, technical buyers, OSS-friendly. Autumn is already the default among S25 and is winning rapid adoption across W25 and P25 batches as well.[2]

Long term — billing for every software business

Subscription billing infrastructure grows from ~$7.9B in 2024 to ~$32.8B by 2034 at ~16% CAGR.[7] The broader SaaS market — $266B in 2024 to $1.13T by 2032 at ~20% CAGR — is the long pole.[15] Every SaaS business eventually adopts usage or hybrid pricing. Autumn's bet is that they all need a real pricing engine on top of Stripe's rails.

Every YC AI company is a billing problem in waiting. Autumn should be the answer by default — and that's how the next generation of billing infrastructure gets written.
— Orange Collective

Competitive landscape

Three categories of competition. Autumn is positioned against all of them.

Each category has a structural limitation — sales motion, source model, or stack depth. Autumn's OSS + dashboard + Stripe-as-rail stance is the answer to all three.

Stripe Billing

The rails — not the engine

Global payments rails, 300k+ Billing companies, ~200M active subscriptions.[5] Stripe's revenue model is structurally optimized for stable seat/subscription pricing. The five-API-five-webhook-five-DB-table shape is the gap the entire UBP category exists to fill — and the one Stripe has been slowest to close.

Closed-source enterprise UBP

Metronome · Orb

Metronome ($50M Series C, 8× YoY billings processed),[4] Orb ($19.1M+ disclosed).[12] Powerful UBP modeling, mature enterprise features, sales-led. The gap is structural: closed-source, premium pricing, and a six-figure procurement motion that doesn't fit the YC AI cohort buying loop.

Open-source UBP — Lago, Polar

Adjacent OSS

Lago ($22M, OSS UBP for infra teams)[13] and Polar (Accel-led $10M Seed, OSS dev-led billing).[14] Lago is composable but setup-heavy; Polar's MoR model adds fee overhead. Autumn is the only OSS option positioned around the AI-native pricing patterns (credits, rollovers, custom per-account plans) with a Stripe-on-rails motion.

Mature subscription suites — Chargebee

Legacy SaaS

Feature-rich and mature for the seat-based SaaS world. Heavy integration, pricing tuned for mid-market and up, no UBP-native primitives. The wrong tool for the AI-native cohort, but a useful proof point on what the eventual feature surface looks like.

Stripe's revenue model assumes a stable answer to "how do you charge?" That assumption is dead for AI. The OSS billing layer that sits on top of Stripe and absorbs the volatility is the natural next category — and Autumn is the company writing it.
— Orange Collective

Founder deep dive

Two founders, one obsession with the part of Stripe nobody wanted to maintain.

Why John built it. John spent six years building developer tools, including a low-code backend platform before Recase. Every product he shipped ran into the same wall: pricing changes are a re-platform. The fastest founders he watched ship in a day; the ones using raw Stripe shipped in a quarter. He had already built every brittle part of this stack at least twice.

Why Ayush built it. Ayush sat inside Checkout.com on payments product, leading fraud and infrastructure initiatives. He saw merchants try to bend payment rails into pricing engines and watched the seams tear. From the rails side, he learned what was reasonable to ask of a payment provider and what was unreasonable. Autumn is the unreasonable list, packaged.

Why this team is the right team. A devtools-OSS founder who has lived the pricing migration pain twice meets a payments-product founder who has seen it from the rails side. They cover both halves of the problem — the DX surface developers touch and the payment-system depth Autumn has to abstract reliably.

Why velocity is a feature. Four reference calls returned the same observation: the founders ship faster than the customer's own team. One customer shared a Slack thread where a Friday afternoon bug was fixed and deployed in twenty minutes. Multiple customers said the same thing — "value far exceeds what we pay."[11]

The long arc. Autumn becomes the system of record for how AI software is metered, gated, and monetized. Every change to a pricing plan, every credit issued, every overage charged flows through one platform. The OSS core wins distribution; the dashboard powers the renewal; the long-term moat is the operational memory of how thousands of AI businesses actually charge.

Founder & team

John Yeo

John Yeo

Co-founder

Six years building developer tools. Previously built Recase, a low-code platform for backend developers. Computer engineering at Imperial College London. OSS-first.

Ayush Rodrigues

Ayush Rodrigues

Repeat Founder

Co-founder

Payments product at Checkout.com (London) leading fraud and infrastructure initiatives. Finance background. Lived the merchant-side pain of building on top of payment rails.

Risks & mitigations

Risk

Stripe ships a real usage-based billing layer — not just primitives, but the pricing engine itself.

Mitigation

Stripe Billing's growth (300k+ companies, ~200M active subscriptions) is the central revenue line — it is structurally optimized for stable seat/subscription pricing. Building a real-time metering plane would cannibalize that motion the same way an AI-first observability product would cannibalize Datadog's dashboards. Autumn is building on top of Stripe as the payments rail, not against it — and is winning the segment Stripe under-serves: AI-native startups that change pricing every month.

Risk

OSS monetization — the Lago/Polar/Vercel question. Will paid features compound, or will the OSS core absorb all the upside?

Mitigation

Autumn's wedge is the dashboard, not the SDK. Pricing versioning, custom plans per account, credits issuance, rollovers, analytics — these are the workflows ops and finance use without engineers. The OSS core builds distribution; the control plane is what scales ARR per customer. Same playbook as Vercel + Next.js or Supabase + Postgres.

Risk

Enterprise feature depth — SOC 2 Type 2, fine-grained RBAC, multi-entity billing, revenue recognition — takes years to mature.

Mitigation

Autumn is intentionally starting at the bottom of the market. The AI-native cohort buys product, not procurement: a single developer makes the decision in an afternoon. Enterprise depth follows the customers up-market on the same timeline that won Stripe and Datadog their early-day reputations.

Risk

Concentration in early-stage AI startups. If the cohort consolidates or pivots away from UBP, the install base contracts.

Mitigation

Autumn supports hybrid pricing — seats, credits, consumption, and rollovers — so the same primitives bend with the customer as they evolve from token-metered to outcome-based to agent-priced. 85% of software companies already run some flavor of UBP — the directional bet is already validated at scale.

What we're watching

  • Customers crossing $1M ARR and staying on Autumn — does the control plane hold as billing complexity scales?
  • Stripe's response to AI-native billing — feature drop, partnership, or acquisition.
  • First non-AI enterprise win — a signal that the product travels outside the YC cohort.
  • Conversion of OSS adopters to paid platform fees as repos cross the 5–10k star line.

References

  1. [1]Autumn — Product homepage
  2. [2]Y Combinator — Autumn company profile
  3. [3]GitHub — useautumn/autumn (Apache-2.0, 2.6k stars)
  4. [4]Metronome — State of Usage-Based Pricing 2025 (Benioff quote, 85% UBP adoption)
  5. [5]Stripe — 2024 Update ($1.4T TPV, 300k+ Stripe Billing customers, 78% of Forbes AI 50)
  6. [6]Chargebee — 2024 State of Subscriptions & Revenue Growth
  7. [7]Precedence Research — Subscription Billing Market to $32.8B by 2034
  8. [8]Sequoia Training Data — Guillermo Rauch on ChatGPT as fastest-growing acquisition channel
  9. [9]GitHub Octoverse 2024 (AI coding tools adoption)
  10. [10]Metronome — Raises $50M Series C to redefine billing as a growth engine
  11. [11]Orange Collective customer reference calls (Aug 2025) — Autumn customers including one OC portfolio company
  12. [12]TechCrunch — Orb builds billing infrastructure ($19.1M+ disclosed)
  13. [13]TechCrunch — Lago (Paris-based OSS billing) raises $22M (2024)
  14. [14]Polar — OSS billing for developers ($10M Seed, Accel-led)
  15. [15]Fortune Business Insights — SaaS market $266B (2024) → $1.13T (2032)