Billing is the part of a database company nobody blogs about, which is exactly why it rots. Mid-June we rebuilt ours around one principle: I should be able to explain any invoice in one breath, and reproduce it by hand from the usage records.
The mechanics: monthly billing now lives in a single system of record instead of being assembled from pieces at invoice time. The free tier's $5 per month is applied as a genuine invoice discount — you see the usage, you see the credit, you see the difference — not as invisible pre-invoice math. Credits themselves moved to a plain counter model: how many credit grants you hold and how many cents they're worth, incremented and decremented like a ledger, because ledger arithmetic is the kind you can check. And when a charge attempt fails transiently on the payment processor's side, we retry instead of silently producing a gap you'd have to email us about.
The free tier itself stayed what it's been since May: $5 in credits every month, no strings. Around day 90 we ask for a card — and the card gates the credit, not your data. No card means the monthly credit stops; your collections and your export button work exactly as before. That distinction is the whole point. Payment pressure applied to your data is a hostage situation; applied to a subsidy, it's just a business model.
None of this makes the pricing page more exciting, and that's the goal. Excitement in billing is always bad news.