Perusage

Perusage is a term used in business and technology contexts to describe a pricing or billing approach in which charges are assessed based on the amount of a service consumed. It is commonly used as a shorthand for usage-based pricing, and may be found in vendor marketing, pricing guides, and discussions of pay-as-you-go models. The exact origin of the term is unclear; it appears as a compound of "per" and "usage" and is sometimes used interchangeably with related phrases.

In perusage pricing, value is tied to consumption. Metering units vary by service and may include API calls, data transferred, compute time, storage used, or events processed. Billing cycles may be monthly, with overage thresholds, tiered rates, or caps. Some offerings combine perusage with fixed fees or differential pricing tiers to smooth revenue and encourage adoption.

Benefits and challenges: Perusage aligns price with value and user intensity, supports scalable adoption, and favors light users. However, it requires robust metering, transparent metrics, and reliable data integrity. Complex pricing can confuse customers, create billing disputes, and require sophisticated billing systems. Privacy and security considerations arise when usage data is collected.

Applications: common in cloud computing, API services, streaming platforms, and software-as-a-service providers that bill by consumption rather than per-seat or flat rates. Related concepts include pay-as-you-go, metered billing, and tiered pricing.

See also: usage-based pricing, pay-as-you-go, metered billing.