Announcing Stigg 2.0 - The Usage Runtime for AI Products

Blog /<br>Stigg Announcements

Announcing Stigg 2.0<br>Every AI request is a spend decision. Make it in milliseconds.

Written by<br>Dor Sasson

Anton Zagrebelny

Last updated<br>June 30, 2026

read time<br>10<br>minutes

Table of contents<br>ENFORCEMENT

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https://www.stigg.io/blog-posts/announcing-stigg-2-0-the-usage-runtime-for-ai-products

Four years ago, we started building Stigg because we believed the way software companies manage pricing and entitlements was fundamentally broken. Engineers were burning months building homegrown billing logic instead of shipping product. Every pricing change was a deployment. Every enterprise deal was a custom integration.<br>We were right about the problem. But the world changed faster than anyone expected - and the change revealed something we didn't fully appreciate at the start: entitlements aren't just a billing convenience. They are becoming the most critical infrastructure abstraction in the AI economy.<br>Today, we're announcing Stigg 2.0 - the most significant release in our company's history. Before I walk through what we built, I want to explain why we built it. Because the "why" is the whole story.<br>The Smartest Companies in AI Are Building In-House. That Should Terrify You.<br>There's a trend happening right now that almost nobody is talking about publicly. The most technically sophisticated companies in the world - OpenAI, Anthropic, the frontier labs, the companies defining what AI products look like - are building their own billing and access control infrastructure from scratch.<br>The Head of Financial Engineering from one of the largest AI Frontier told us directly: "What we really needed was something that was close to real time, if not real time, that could tell us - do you have credits or not?" She said they evaluated every third-party metering and billing platform on the market. None of them could make synchronous access decisions. Most were built for a different era - aggregate usage over the month, send an invoice at the end. That model doesn't work when a single API call can cost dollars, when agents spawn sub-agents in milliseconds, and when a fraudulent user can burn through thousands of credits before your batch job runs.<br>In February 2026, OpenAI published "Beyond Rate Limits" - the most architecturally revealing piece of writing any AI company has released about its billing internals. The key concept is a "decision waterfall": instead of asking "is this request allowed?", their system asks "how much is allowed, and from where?" Every request passes through a single evaluation path that synchronously checks rate limits, verifies credits, and returns one definitive outcome. Credit debits settle asynchronously. Rate limits, free tiers, credits, promotions, and enterprise entitlements are all layers in the same decision stack.<br>We read that post and recognized our own architecture.<br>But here's what should concern every engineering team reading this: OpenAI can afford to build this. They have hundreds of engineers and the revenue to justify a dedicated team. Most companies don't. And the "we can build a credit counter in a weekend" pitch is one of the most dangerous lies in software. Yes, you can build a counter in a weekend. Two months later, you'll have a system that handles 30% of the edge cases - and the other 70% will show up as billing disputes, revenue leakage, angry enterprise customers, and 3am pages.<br>The build-in-house trend isn't happening because companies want to build. It's happening because existing billing platforms failed them. Incumbents solutions were designed for a world where subscriptions renew monthly, usage gets aggregated into line items, and the invoice is the moment of truth. In AI, the moment of truth is the API call. The request. The inference. The agent action. If you can't decide in real time whether that request should proceed, you've already lost - either to fraud, to budget overruns, or to a customer experience that breaks trust.<br>In AI, the moment of truth is the API call. The request. The inference. The agent action. If you can't decide in real time whether that request should proceed, you've already lost - either to fraud, to budget overruns, or to a customer experience that breaks trust.<br>Stigg 2.0 exists to make the build-in-house path unnecessary. The architecture OpenAI built internally - as a product. For every AI company.<br>Why Entitlements Are the Abstraction That Changes Everything<br>If "billing" is the system of record for what was sold, entitlements are the system of record for what was fulfilled. That distinction is about to become the most important one in enterprise software. Here's why.<br>AI companies ship features faster than commerce can keep up. In 2025 alone, we tracked 1,800 pricing changes across 500 companies. OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Figma, Clay, Monday.com, HubSpot,...