CAP 140

Category:	Platform operations
Business Goal:	BG-011 — License the platform to smaller financial institutions as modular SaaS
System Domain:	SD07 — Data Platform (collection + reporting); SD06 — Risk Platform (attribution engine)
Satisfying Modules:	MOD-097 Usage event collector · MOD-098 Cost attribution engine · MOD-099 Usage and billing report
ADR:	ADR-040

Description

Every billable operation across all platform modules is metered, attributed to the responsible licensee tenant, and surfaced as a transparent real-time cost and usage report. Licensees can drill from their monthly total down to the module level, resource type, and individual event.

The billing model is a three-part tariff: 1. Customer levy — per active customer per month (the head-count charge) 2. Facility fee — per activated module per month (the feature charge) 3. Variable consumption — per unit above an included threshold for Snowflake credits, ML inferences, enrichment API calls, notification sends, and document storage

An optional fourth line — infrastructure passthrough — shows the actual tagged AWS and Snowflake costs so sophisticated licensees can see the cost basis.

Metering pipeline

All platform modules
  └─ Lambda layer intercept + EventBridge usage events
        └─ Kinesis Firehose → S3 → Snowflake metering.usage_events
              └─ + AWS Cost Explorer API (daily, tagged by tenant)
              └─ + Snowflake metering_history (per-warehouse credits)
              └─ + External API cost logs
                    └─ MOD-098 attribution engine
                          └─ metering.daily_tenant_summary (DT, 1h lag)
                          └─ metering.billing_period_summary (DT, 4h lag)
                          └─ metering.unit_economics (internal, daily)
                                └─ MOD-099 billing report
                                      └─ Licensee dashboard (real-time)
                                      └─ Monthly invoice PDF
                                      └─ Internal gross margin view

What "transparent" means

A licensee at any point in the billing period can see: - Rolling estimated total for the current period (updated every 4 hours) - Per-module breakdown: which modules are generating which costs - Variable consumption: actual usage vs included threshold, current overage charge - Infrastructure passthrough: real AWS/Snowflake cost attributed to their tenant - 30-day trend chart with event annotations

There are no billing surprises. Disputes are prevented, not resolved.

Internal value

The same pipeline produces unit economics for the bank's own finance team: - Cost to serve each module per active customer - Gross margin by licensee tenant - Unattributed cost monitor (tagging governance gap detection) - Platform-wide cost trends (informs pricing reviews and capacity planning)