Q: What if I need to move off Autumn? Am I locked in?

Autumn is open source. You can self-host anytime, or export all your data. Your Stripe subscriptions, customers and payment details remain yours. Moving off Autumn is simply a case of building what you would have built in-house anyway (but this has never happened, touch wood!). You can even do this gradually: first by replicating customer state into your own system via our webhooks, then making a full transition after.

Q: Can you do the implementation for us?

If you're setting up payments for the first time, most teams go live in under an hour. Migrating from an existing billing system typically takes 1–2 weeks, depending on complexity. For Series A+ companies, we provide a forward deployed service to work with your team, dual-write to your internal system and Autumn, then smoothly migrate over. Minimal work needed on your part.

Q: Can you handle our event volume?

Yes. Autumn supports 10,000+ events per second per end customer. We've processed millions of billing events daily for AI companies at scale. If you have specific requirements, reach out—we'll walk through our architecture.

Question 1

Do I still need Stripe?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Autumn works with Stripe—it handles the billing logic that Stripe doesn't. You keep your Stripe account, your customer relationships, and your payment data. Autumn sits between your app and Stripe, managing webhooks, usage limits, and state. You're never locked in. Your subscriptions live in Stripe.

Question 2

Do I need to call Autumn before every action?

Accepted Answer

For latency-sensitive operations, you may not want to make an autumn.check() network call before every action. Instead, you can either cache the Autumn customer data on your end, or use our single customer.products.updated webhook to replicate the Autumn state into your own system.

Question 3

What if Autumn goes down? Will my app go down?

Accepted Answer

We run on redundant infrastructure and high availability is our priority. However, not being able to reach Autumn does not mean that your app will go down. Our app and SDKs default to fail open and fail fast, meaning that in a worst case scenario, some users may get temporary additional access. We can work with you to reconcile usage tracking and balances afterward if needed.

Question 4

How is Autumn different from Orb or Metronome?

Accepted Answer

Orb and Metronome focus on usage metering—tracking how much customers consume, suitable for end of month invoicing. You still have to build access control and state management separately, meaning you'll wire together your own logic, Stripe billing and a metering provider. Autumn is a complete system of record. We handle usage metering + entitlements + feature gating + billing state in one API. check() tells you if a user can access a feature in <50ms.

Question 5

What if I need to move off Autumn? Am I locked in?

Accepted Answer

Autumn is open source. You can self-host anytime, or export all your data. Your Stripe subscriptions, customers and payment details remain yours. Moving off Autumn is simply a case of building what you would have built in-house anyway (but this has never happened, touch wood!). You can even do this gradually: first by replicating customer state into your own system via our webhooks, then making a full transition after.

Question 6

Can you do the implementation for us?

Accepted Answer

If you're setting up payments for the first time, most teams go live in under an hour. Migrating from an existing billing system typically takes 1–2 weeks, depending on complexity. For Series A+ companies, we provide a forward deployed service to work with your team, dual-write to your internal system and Autumn, then smoothly migrate over. Minimal work needed on your part.

Question 7

Can you handle our event volume?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Autumn supports 10,000+ events per second per end customer. We've processed millions of billing events daily for AI companies at scale. If you have specific requirements, reach out—we'll walk through our architecture.

Usage-based billing for frontier startups