In this instructional walkthrough, Ryan, a developer at Schematic, demonstrates how to set up a credit‑burndown (token‑based) pricing model using Schematic’s platform. He creates a new paid plan (Pro Credits), adds basic entitlements, defines a credit pool called “AI tokens,” and configures monthly credit grants. He then links usage‑based features (AI Assist and AI Experiments) to the credit pool with specific consumption rates, including fractional rates. Ryan shows how to create credit bundles of varying sizes with volume discounts, integrates these bundles into the live checkout flow, and explains Schematic’s credit consumption logic—monthly grants are use‑or‑lose, purchased bundles never expire, and consumption occurs from the earliest‑expiring pool first. He also covers one‑time credit grants for promotions and bookkeeping. The demo ends with a full checkout example, illustrating how customers can purchase the plan plus additional bundles, and emphasizes that Schematic handles all underlying complexity.
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Hi, I'm Ryan, a developer at Schematic, and I want to show you how Schematic can implement credit burndown, one of the most popular pricing models that we see today in the market. Credit burndown has become a really popular pricing model because it allows you to take multiple different usage-based features and roll them into one simple pricing metric. I want to walk through an example of how that works. Here's an example setup in Schematic that we're going to migrate to a credit burndown approach. This is our Pro plan, and in this plan, we have a number of features, two of which, AI Assists and AI Experiments, are usage-based. We're going to remodel this plan using credits and show you how quickly and easily that can be done. First, let's create our new plan. We're going to call this Pro Credits so we, uh, can tell it apart from the other Pro plan. And we're going to mark this as a paid plan. All credit burn-down plans need to be paid plans because of how we report usage back to Stripe to generate appropriate invoices. We will give this the same price as the other plan and click Save. Now let's add all the basic entitlements that the Pro plan has before we add the specific credit-based usage entitlements. The Pro plan had reports, it had public reports as well, it had standard filters, and it had custom filters. So we'll add all of these Basic entitlements. Uh, we'll additionally add the seat-based entitlement it had, um, which was an overage entitlement where 5 seats were included, and then if you wanted additional seats, they cost $10. Now it's time to start adding our credit-based entitlements, but before we do, we need to actually create a credit pool for these entitlements. In our catalog, we now have a new option for credit types, and a credit type is a pool of credits that can be both added to a plan and that features can pull from. Schematic allows you to have multiple different credit types as well as add different credit types to a given plan. For this example, we're going to create one credit type and add it to the plan we just created. You give your credit a name, which we'll call AI tokens. 'Cause this is gonna power the AI Assist and AI Experiments feature. We can give it a description, AI tokens to power AI features. And then we need to give a, the single unit and multiple unit name. These will appear throughout the components and any other time we refer to these. And then we can add a cost basis. Cost basis itself doesn't do anything, but it's a reminder for how much you expect a credit to cost for accounting purposes, as well as when you're pricing out Features and Credit Pools. We now have our credit type. The next step is to add this to our plan. So here we're adding a credit grant to our plan, and what this means is that when you subscribe to this plan, you will get this— you will get a certain number of credits every month. Let's say 2,000 credits to support our 500 AI assists and 1,000 AI experiments that the comparable Pro plan had. And now every month, users will get 2,000 AI tokens that they can use for their AI features. Next, let's actually add those features to this plan and pull from this credit pool. So for AI Assist, we'll say that this is a credit burndown feature, and it'll pull from the AI tokens credit type that we created. For consumption rate, this is the number of tokens that each Each time a user takes this action, they will consume. These can be fractional, and for our example, let's say these are 2.5 credits. Next, we'll add the AI Experiments feature. Again, this is a credit burndown feature. We'll pull from our credit pool, and we'll set the consumption rate to 1. However, you are able to do fractional, you know, less than 1 consumption rates as well. Now we've added both of these features, and instead of having their own usage allotments, they now will pull from this credit pool. What makes credit burndown such an interesting pricing model is that it lets you grant customers a certain amount of usage each month, but also lets those users buy additional usage as needed, similar to an overage model. In credit burndown, we think of these as credit bundles where users aren't just buying credits one at a time, but they're buying them in packs. And typically we can offer discounts if they're willing to buy larger bundles upfront. To set up these additional credits, we're going to go into our credit type and we're going to create bundles. And again, a bundle is just a set of credits a user can buy to top up or add additional usage once they've exhausted the amount that's included in their plan. We're going to create a small bundle that'll give users 1,000 credits, and we're going to charge $10 a month, or sorry, $10 for this bundle. We're then gonna create a medium-sized bundle, and this is gonna be 2,000. Um, and like it says, let's give them 10% off. So instead of $20, we're only gonna charge $18 for this. And then finally, we'll create a large bundle, and this will be twice the size of the medium bundle. So 4,000 credits. Um, and again, we'll give 20% off. So instead of $40, we'll charge $32 for this bundle. These discounts are merely a recommendation. They can be configured however you want. So far, we've set up a new plan. We've added all the necessary features, including the credit burndown features we've needed. We set up our credit pool and we've added some bundles to those pools. And the last step is to actually add all of these to our live configuration so that they show up in our components. For plans, we need to add our credit, our Pro-based credit plan, and we will swap it over here. So it goes Pro, the ProCredit Enterprise. And then we also want to add our live credit bundles here so that users can purchase these, uh, in the checkout flow. Once we're all done, we click save changes, and now all these will be reflected in a component. To give you a sense of what that looks like, let's go through our checkout flow for our new credit-based plan. We now see our Pro Credits plan in here, and we can select this plan. And then while checking out add-ons that are available, are also available for credit-based plans. But we'll now also get the ability to add bundles. In this example, let's say we're going to add one medium bundle and one large bundle because we really expect to use a lot of these AI features. And now we can purchase, uh, this new credit-based plan, uh, with two additional credit bundles. And now we see that we have our 2,000 AI tokens per month, as well as an additional 2,000 and 4,000 token bundle. Underneath the hood, there's actually some complexity in terms of how credit should be consumed. Schematic handles all of this for you and does so in the best way for your users. In this example, we see 3 different possible credit grants: the 2,000 that are included each month, and then the additional 2,000 and 4,000 bundle users purchased each month. The 2,000 that are included in the plan are use 'em or lose 'em. These do not roll over, and at the end of the month, if all 2,000 have not been consumed, the remaining ones are lost, and then the grant is refreshed for the beginning of the next pay period. However, the purchase bundles never expire and roll over until they are used. When it comes time to consume credits, Schematic always consumes from the pool that expires first. Typically, this is the monthly grant, so those credits are consumed first, and then once those have been exhausted, will begin to pull from any credit pools that users have bought. Additionally, it's possible to give customers one-time credit grants at your discretion. This could be because you're running a promotion, or maybe a customer used all their credits quick— more quickly than they expected, and you wanna give them a little bit of extra breathing room this month. When you add credit grants, you once again select the credit pool you wanna pull from, the number of credits you wanna give, and then a reason for these. The reason it doesn't take any specific action, but is useful for bookkeeping in the future, if you want to understand why credits were granted. And that's it. That's everything you need to know to begin using credit burndown with Schematic. We're really excited to bring you such a powerful pricing model and allow you to roll it out as quickly as possible. Thanks.
