Token Usage Dashboard

Designing trusted visibility for a shift to usage-based pricing (pre-launch)

The company was transitioning from bespoke, manually estimated pricing to a usage-based model.

For this to work, customers needed to understand how their applications consumed tokens without exposing unreliable or misleading data.

The core design challenge was deciding what we could show without creating false confidence or mistrust.

The problem

I partnered with product, engineering, DevOps, and data to help define a shippable MVP.

My focus was on:

  • Clarifying user needs across business and technical stakeholders

  • Surfacing trade-offs early

  • Constraining scope to reliable signals that could ship

What I worked on

  • Narrowed the MVP to business users focused on planning and budgeting

  • Avoided granular breakdowns that looked precise but weren’t reliable

  • Designed around trends, remaining capacity, and planning signals not diagnostics

  • Treated alerts and deeper diagnostics as fast follows once infrastructure matured

Key Decisions

The result was a token usage dashboard that:

  • Centralized usage visibility in the admin experience

  • Helped business users answer “Am I on track?” and “Where should I pay attention?”

  • Reduced risk in adopting a new pricing model

  • Established a scalable foundation for future iterations

Outcome

Usage based pricing only works if customers trust what they see. This project helped bridge the gap between incomplete data and confident decision-making without over compromising accuracy.

Why this matters