Pooled usage allowances are a billing model where a team or organization gets a shared quantity of resources—like AI credits, API calls, or data storage—for a flat price. Instead of giving each user a separate, siloed allowance, the entire organization draws from a central “pool.”

This model is often paired with soft per-seat limits, which act as a monitoring and abuse-prevention mechanism rather than a hard paywall. For example, a team of 10 might have a pool of 1,000,000 AI tokens per month, with a soft limit of 100,000 tokens per seat. This structure provides flexibility while still offering a degree of predictability.

The core idea is simple: a subscription provides a large, shared allowance for an entire organization. All members of that organization consume resources from this single pool.

Here’s a breakdown of the moving parts:

• The Pool: A defined quantity of a metered resource (e.g., 5,000 build minutes, 10,000 API calls, 2,000 AI-generated images) allocated to the entire organization for a billing period.
• Consumption: As individual users engage with the product, their usage is tracked and deducted from the shared pool.
• Soft Limits (Optional but Recommended): You can set individual user or role-based guidelines to monitor usage. If a user exceeds their soft limit, it can trigger a notification for an administrator rather than immediately blocking access. This prevents a single user from accidentally depleting the entire pool.
• Quota Policies: These are the rules that govern what happens when the pool runs low or is exhausted. Does the service stop? Do you charge for overages? Do you notify an admin to upgrade?

For example, a project management tool might offer a “Pro” plan for $100/month that includes 500 integrations and 10,000 automated workflow runs for the whole team. Some users might only need a few workflows, while power users might run hundreds. The pooled model accommodates both without friction.

Pooled allowances are particularly effective for products with features that have variable or unpredictable usage patterns, especially those encouraging collaboration or leveraging AI.

• Removes adoption friction: Users can experiment with features without worrying about hitting a personal paywall. This is crucial for collaborative tools where one person’s usage often benefits the entire team. A designer can freely use AI image generation credits knowing that the developers who need fewer credits balance out the team’s total consumption.
• Supports bursty usage: AI features and collaborative workflows often see spikes in activity. A marketing team might use a large number of AI content generation credits at the end of a quarter. Pooled usage easily absorbs these bursts without requiring a plan change for a temporary need.
• Simplifies billing for buyers: For a manager or CTO, it’s much easier to approve one predictable monthly cost for the whole team than to manage dozens of individual, fluctuating bills. It provides budget certainty while giving their team the resources it needs.
• Increases product engagement: By removing the fear of individual limits, teams are more likely to explore and integrate your product’s full capabilities into their daily workflows, leading to stickier customers.

Getting pooled allowances right requires a bit of planning. The math needs to be fair, and the policies need to be clear to avoid customer frustration.

• Set generous but reasonable pool sizes: The goal is to provide enough resources for a typical team to operate without friction, encouraging adoption. Analyze usage data from existing customers to find a sweet spot that feels abundant but prevents excessive over-consumption.
• Use soft limits for monitoring, not blocking: Implement notifications for administrators when a user exceeds a certain threshold. This turns it into a management conversation (“Looks like you’re getting a lot of value from this feature! Should we look at a larger plan?”) instead of a frustrating dead end for the user.
• Implement clear quota policies: Be transparent about what happens when the pool is depleted. The most common approaches are:
  • Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) overages: Automatically charge for consumption beyond the pool. This is best for business-critical features where service interruption is not an option.
  • Upgrade prompts: Notify admins that the pool is low and provide a one-click path to purchase a larger allowance or upgrade their plan.
  • Service degradation: Limit access to the feature until the next billing cycle. This is simpler but can create a negative user experience if not communicated well.
• Provide clear dashboards: Give organization admins a clear view of their total pool, how much has been consumed, and which users or departments are the highest consumers. This transparency builds trust and helps them manage their own teams effectively.

While powerful, pooled allowances come with a few potential pitfalls. Anticipating them can help you design a better system.

• The “Noisy Neighbor” problem: One power user or a runaway script consumes a disproportionate amount of the shared pool, leaving none for the rest of the team.
  • Solution: This is where soft limits and admin notifications are critical. By alerting an admin to unusual consumption patterns, they can intervene before it impacts the entire team.
• Predicting future costs: For your customers, moving from a per-seat model to a consumption model can make budgeting feel less predictable, even with a pooled allowance.
  • Solution: Offer pricing calculators and clear dashboards showing historical usage. This helps managers forecast their needs and choose the right-sized pool. For enterprise customers, consider annual plans with large allowances to provide even greater budget certainty.
• Complexity in billing logic: The code required to track, aggregate, and report on shared usage is more complex than a simple per-seat subscription.
  • Solution: Start with a simple implementation focused on the total pool. Add per-user tracking and soft limits as you scale. Leveraging a modern billing platform can also offload much of this complexity.

Kinde’s billing engine is designed to support flexible, usage-based pricing models like pooled allowances. It allows you to define product features as “metered” and report consumption against them for an entire organization.

You can create plans that bundle a fixed monthly subscription fee with a generous pool of usage for specific features. Using the Kinde Management API, your application can then report usage events as they happen. Kinde aggregates this data, ties it to the correct organization’s subscription, and includes any overages in their next invoice.

This approach lets you offload the complexity of tracking entitlements and managing billing cycles, so you can focus on building a great product experience around your collaborative and AI-powered features.

• Pricing models
• About plans
• Add metered usage for a customer via API