Stripe on Monday released a preview of a new feature that could help AI startups (and other companies) solve the problem of passing through the underlying costs of AI model usage to their customers.

Stripe’s feature, however, goes even further than just passing through the costs of the tokens. It allows startups to charge a markup percentage on token usage. So a company can, for instance, charge an automatic 30% above the cost of the tokens that the startup will pay the model maker.

As Stripe described it, “Say you’re building an AI app: you want a consistent 30% margin over raw LLM token costs across providers. Billing automates the process.”