Schematic at Operators Guild Demo Day 2026: How to bill for AI credits without a surprise bill

First of all, thank you so much, Operators Guild, for having us. My name is Fynn Glover. I'm a co-founder and CEO of Schematic, and Schematic is a usage billing and governance platform. It is built for companies that are making the shift into the world of hybrid consumption billing, especially credit-based billing. And our specialty is usage billing, entitlement management, and usage governance so that companies don't break trust with their customers in a consumption-based world. So that you have a little bit of insight into who we are, Gio is our CPO. He'll be demoing the product today. Ben is our CTO. This is the second company that we've founded together. We've been building together across several different venture-backed companies for most of the last decade. We founded Schematic in 2023 and have raised $12 million in seed capital from great institutional investors and world-class founders. It really is our point of view that usage-based billing either builds trust or breaks it. And this means that we can't just bill for usage. Instead, our approach to consumption billing has to build trust inside our product experience, and that is the bar that customers are demanding. I would imagine that many of you have already seen this and seen this done poorly. I'm guessing most of you over the last year have sat across from a vendor selling you an agentic product on credits with an annual commit. And I imagine that you were asking questions like, how do we know how much usage we need? How will we see what we're using? How will we be able to predict whether we'll run through our credit commit? What happens if we run out? How will we approach credit controls? Can we allocate credits to different teams and people? How are you going to prevent us from having a surprise bill? The screenshot on this slide may look in some ways familiar. This is a text message from the CEO of a $55 million ARR SaaS business who's moving his business to credit-based pricing using Schematic, and he's texting me his frustration with the credit experience delivered by one of his most important pieces of sales software. And things are moving really fast, and I'm not trying to pick on any vendor, but I think what is happening and what we're seeing is that increasingly procurement teams will not tolerate this degree of opaqueness around usage. The questions that I think we are all asking of the vendors that we're buying from are becoming standard procurement requirements around consumption products. And these questions typically map to 3 conditions of trust. Can I see what I'm using in real time? Can I forecast my usage against what I've bought? Can I control how we allocate and manage our usage against our limits? The problem is that no billing platform on the market is structurally designed to deliver those conditions of trust to your customer. So why, why is this? It is because even the most well-funded usage-based billing platforms on the market do not manage and control entitlements in your product at runtime. An entitlement is what someone can do with your product based on what they've purchased. And this means that billing platforms cannot help you control whether a user can burn the next credit or give your customers the same degree of control within their own environment and across their teams. And this is why when we founded Schematic 3 years ago, we designed it very differently from day one. The key structural difference is that our billing platform is built natively on a runtime entitlement engine so that you can give your customers what they are beginning to ask for: credit controls, token management, spend caps, user-level credit pools, usage governance, and ultimately trust. And all of this, as we'll show, is embedded in your product to your design standards and powered by your API. What does this really mean and start to look like? It means that Schematic is a platform that is combining all of the table stakes functionality that a company needs around usage-based billing and real-time credit-based billing with enforcement in very commercially friendly ways so that your product and engineering team can deliver real-time usage transparency, predictability, and controls to your customers and your product. This means fair use policies around alerting. This means clear and transparent approaches to things like throttling, to overages, to how you enforce the limit. This means usage caps and spend controls, especially per-user credit allotments or even agentic credit allotments. Again, all of this natively delivered in your product so that you are continuously creating confidence and trust and paths to expansion for your customer base. One of the things that I want to ultimately underline is that for our customers, this is not just a billing tool, it's not just entitlements infrastructure, it's increasingly a sales tool. This is infrastructure that is mitigating sales objections, it is building trust in the usage-based deal, It is unlocking enterprise contracts whose requirements around usage control are always different and very quickly changing. And so we're going to demo the product here in a second. And before we do, I want to ground it in a customer so that you can, you can kind of see and feel the type of customer that is using this type of infrastructure. Plotly is a Series C company with a product that thousands of data teams love. When they came to us, they were about to launch their first 2 AI products, and they had 4 questions. How do we price agentic products and ensure we can be iterative? How do we package them? How do we sell them in the context of both product-led and sales-led growth? And as we bring these new offerings and new usage-based pricing to our customers, how do we do it in a way that does not break trust? Those 4 questions are representative of, you know, the types of questions companies are asking us when they're moving to schematic. Plotly felt they had 3 options as they evaluated their billing infrastructure. They could buy a UVB platform, they could buy a billing and quoting platform, or they could buy a billing and enforcement platform that would work especially well on top of Stripe. And they chose the third for 4 reasons. It supported both product-led and enterprise sales in one system. It gave them freedom in how they built their product catalog across any pricing model. It took engineering time on billing close to zero. And because entitlements and enforcement sit in the same system as billing, they could tell their customers exactly where their usage stood in real time, give them spend caps, usage controls, fair use alerting so that customers were never surprised. With Schematic, they launched 2 new products 6 months ahead of schedule. They saw 5,000 signups on their AI credit-based plan, and they launched a couple of different credit iterations as, as they went through that process, which was awesome to see their velocity. If you buy a billing platform today to support usage and it doesn't have runtime enforcement, Your engineers will have to go build it and maintain it, and every custom deal and every limit change will come back to them. And this is a non-trivial amount of infrastructure to build that is impossible to vibe code because it's extremely deep distributed systems engineering. What we're seeing is that our customers are moving to schematic because they can't accept their best developers becoming billing engineers, and they have to deliver credit controls, usage governance, token management to their customers to build trust in their pricing. We have built a very broad and deep platform. We could spend the next few minutes showing you everything from credits and overrides and versioning and migration. But what we're going to do is we are going to show you how to point an agent at Schematic to provision, meter, and enforce a complex usage-based deal in your product. set up the usage controls and governance, and deliver an enterprise-grade customer experience. Everything that Jio is about to do is through an agent. Your developers can do it through our API, your product and RevOps can do it through our UI. So there's no interface that you're locked into. And so as we set the stage here, let's imagine your sales team is using our very good friends at DealOps. For CPQ. And let's say you've quoted an enterprise with a combination of credits on an annual commit with customized entitlements and contractual policies around top-ups and overages, and then Schematica will take it from there.

Okay, so here we go. I'm actually going to start with a quote like Fynn said, and you, you know, questions come in, we will answer. But we have this quote. We're using this kind of sample product called Dash AI. It's like a dashboard builder that uses— you can prompt in your dashboards. It has the concept of prompting a dashboard, teams, and data sources. And we've created this quote. It's a custom quote for one customer. It's called Fynn's Gloves is the customer. And you can see there's a combination of things in here. They've bought seats. They actually have credits included with seats. They have the concept of dashboard prompts burning those credits. And then they have data sources and other features included with this contract too. And actually what I've done here is I've just dropped this PDF into Claude and it's using the schematic MCP to then convert that into what we call a custom plan. And you can drop in any PDF you'd like, any type of quote, any order form, and it will take that, convert it again into our data model, ask maybe a couple questions around— some questions around like when should this contract start, maybe how should proration work if they're an existing customer, and then it will go ahead and put it into the product. So now I've hopped into Schematic here and I can see this customer Finn's Gloves And I can go ahead and finish finalizing that custom plan. And you can see a couple things here, right? So I showed you that dashboard prompt feature. Unlike other billing products, right, we have this concept of a feature. It's underpinned by a flag, so that actually determines access in your product. And I can say, okay, this dashboard prompt for this customer, I want it to burn 3 credits, or maybe I want to go to an included-in-plan limit, maybe I want to go to overage model or a tiered model. I can easily do that both at the customer level and at the global level. But you can see here I've also set up credits. I've set up, let's, 20,000 credits, but I can also scale it by the seat so I can have 20,000 credits per seat. And I can even set up different top-up policies. So maybe I want to automatically top them up after a certain threshold, or give them the power to set up their own top-up policy. On top of that, we also can offer things like bundles. So if people want to, when they reach their limit, they want to just buy a flat amount of credits, they can do that too. You see the other features that were part of that quote, the seat, the data source, the additional feature. And when I go to finalize here, I can just go through this flow. I can type in, you know, What their billing address is, what the billing email is. There's custom fields if you want them. You can decide how the invoice gets sent. You can decide, do they get access now or upon payment? What are those payment terms? Should we be doing coupons? We will finalize that. We will create a payment link, and then you can send that along. And you have— now we have Finn's Gloves fully provisioned. fully metered. You can track their usage over time. You can also do overrides, so you can manage their access again. You can bump a limit, give them access to a beta feature, bump a limit, but actually, you know, limit it to a certain amount of time. I want to give them 15 seats through next week as we get to renewal, and when I'm ready for renewal, I can go back in, I can create a new version of the plan. And, you know, as always, manage their credits and their promotional credits, everything you expect from a billing platform. But what does this end up looking like for the customer at the end of the day? We call it the enterprise credit wallet, and this is what we focus the most on, is how do you give your customers an experience they can trust as you're selling them usage-based billing? So this is all built on top of the Schematic API. We provide React components, we provide deep SDKs for creating the best possible world-class in-product experience, and it does some of the things that Fynn mentioned. So you can see your usage over time, you can see who's using what and what those proportions look like. You can even do forecasting and feel good that you're not gonna burn through your commit faster than you expected. And like Fynn said, this is what we're hearing over and over coming up in sales deals. It's no longer just good enough to do usage-based. You have to have really good in-product experience for monitoring it, and then perhaps most importantly, controlling it. And this is what we call usage governance. So you can go in, let's say I've bought a million credits a year, but I want to make sure my organization doesn't actually burn more than 300 per day. Or maybe I want to make sure a certain customer, certain user like the admin, has a cap. Or maybe I want to make sure my agent, Agentic users, have different caps, and I want to manage them differently. And this all becomes what we call the Enterprise Wallet. It's a combination of the things you're used to seeing, like what plan you're on, what your usage is, what your limit is. But again, also that control to make sure you don't go pass your limit faster than expected. You prevent abuse, and then you can ensure that you're getting the most return on investment for, for the feature. As you guys know, agents are starting to use your products. That's great, but they can do things passively, and that can be hard to control, and you want to make sure they're getting the highest ROI of your product possible. Usage controls is how to do that. That's kind of that quote to provisioning to control and experience workflow. We of course have the rest of the platform where you can manage your plans, you can manage your credit types and your add-ons and your lifecycle too. But I want to open it up now for questions and make sure we kind of answer any specific questions you have rather than maybe going into the whole thing. Are you able to see the questions in the Q&A box there? I'm happy to read them to you if you'd like. Okay, I'm seeing one for how long does implementation typically take? This depends on your company.

Upsell.

Okay. Yeah, I see. I see now. It depends on your company, but we have, because we've built everything ground up to be MCP as a first-class UI here, it's actually quite fast to just point your agent at our MCP within your codebase and start getting to the point where you can offer one, like a new pricing model to one customer. within your product. So for a smaller company, it can take a couple days and maybe even an afternoon to get started. For a larger company, we like to do kind of a phased rollout where you start out with getting it working for your internal testing and then getting it working for one customer. That can be a couple weeks. Another question I'm seeing here, does it work for PLG and enterprise motions? Very much so. So I showed you that enterprise motion, where you're bringing in a quote, but you also have the ability here, and I'm, I guess I have all this, make the screen share a little bit easier to look at here. You also have the ability to manage your standard plans, your plans that are available to everyone. So this gets, and you can have, you know, set up different catalogs for your different products, decide how that gets shown in checkout. version those out. So if I have like a pro plan and I want to make a change to it, it's very easy to make that change, create a new version, do a migration, keep people on legacy, you know, are we moving people at the end of the billing period? How are we handling proration? All of this kind of more typical product-led management is 100% part of the platform. I just started on that enterprise motion. We had a couple other questions answered. Hybrid models, I think I hit on that. Any other questions coming through? Great. I think we're almost at our time. Fynn, do you want to leave us with anything here?

Let's see, we got one more question and then we can wrap.

How does Schematic work with my CPQ? Okay, I just saw that one. Okay, yeah, so it works. So we have native integrations too, but like what I just showed is the one that's out of the box, which is you're able to just drop in a quote, work with our MCP, and get that provisioned in into your product, into the billing system. And then we also have native integrations if, if you have one of the ones we, we support. Deal.