Usage Continuity Ledger (UCL)
9/10
Demand Score
Usage undercounting causes revenue leakage and billing disputes; fixes are urgent before renewals and audits.
8/10
Blue Ocean
Competition Level
$1k-8k
Price/Month
Predicted customer spend
10 days
Time to MVP
Difficulty: Hard
The Problem
Scope Creep and Misaligned Objectives
Competitor Landscape
- OpenTelemetry
- Segment
- Snowplow
- Metronome
- Amberflo
- Stripe Metering
Must-Have Features for MVP
Exactly-once event gateway with idempotency keys
Retro-reconstruction engine using CDN/API/DB logs
Continuity Score per tenant/feature with SLO breach alerts
Usage-to-invoice reconciliation rules and variance explanations
Billing connectors (Stripe, Zuora, Chargebee, Recurly)
Offline buffering SDKs and server-side fallbacks
Backfill jobs with provable lineage and replay controls
⚠️ Potential Challenges
- Access to raw logs for reconstruction may require security reviews
- Idempotency across microservices with duplicate events
- Multi-region clock skew and ordering issues
- Mapping product events to billable metrics
- Change management for engineering SDK rollout
- Data residency and PII governance
Risk Level: Moderate
🎯 Keys to Success
- Recovered revenue within first 30 days
- Zero double-billing incidents
- Validated variance under 0.5% vs ground truth
- <1% performance overhead on event ingestion
- Adoption by Finance Ops and Engineering
- Clear auditor-friendly lineage and evidence
Ready to Build This?
This hard-difficulty project could be your next micro-SaaS success.