From "this charge is wrong" to evidence-backed answer in 2 minutes.
Billing tickets are high-stakes and slow. The customer thinks they're being overcharged, and proving otherwise requires cross-referencing Stripe invoices against actual API usage logs. Altor pulls both sides in seconds and surfaces the facts.
Why billing tickets are uniquely expensive
Billing escalations combine two problems: urgency (the customer is upset about money) and complexity (the answer lives across two systems that don't talk to each other). Here's the typical manual workflow:
- Open Stripe. Pull the customer's current invoice, subscription plan, and overage charges.
- Open ClickHouse. Query their actual API usage for the billing period. Count requests by endpoint, check for spikes.
- Compare the two. Does the billed amount match the usage? Were there unexpected spikes? Did a plan change mid-cycle?
- Check for known issues. Search Linear for any billing bugs. Check if a recent deploy affected usage tracking.
- Write the response with evidence: usage breakdown, invoice line items, and explanation.
typical time to resolve a billing dispute manually
systems that must be cross-referenced (billing + usage logs)
Altor's investigation time for the same ticket
cause of churn — unresolved billing disputes
How Altor investigates billing escalations
Customer submits: "My invoice is $2,400 but I expected around $1,500. Can you explain the overage?" Altor investigates:
- Queries Stripe: Current invoice is $2,412. Plan is Growth ($1,500/mo) with per-request overage at $0.002/request.
- Queries ClickHouse: Customer made 456,000 requests this period. 300,000 included in plan, 156,000 overage at $0.002 = $312 overage. Total should be $1,812.
- Identifies discrepancy: Billed $2,412 vs. calculated $1,812. Difference is $600.
- Searches Linear: Finds LIN-671 "double-counting on /v2/batch endpoint" — fixed in last week's deploy but this invoice period was affected.
- Delivers diagnosis: Overage charge is partially incorrect due to a known tracking bug. $600 should be credited. Links to the Linear ticket as evidence.
"Billing disputes went from our most dreaded ticket type to the fastest to resolve. Altor pulls the Stripe invoice and the ClickHouse usage data in parallel — our engineer just reviews the comparison."
Billing patterns Altor handles
Billing tickets come in many forms. Altor investigates all of them by cross-referencing Stripe with your usage data:
- •Overage disputes — compares billed usage against actual ClickHouse logs
- •Payment failures — checks Stripe for declined cards, expired methods, and retry status
- •Plan mismatch — verifies when plan changes took effect vs. when the customer expected them
- •Feature access issues — cross-references plan tier with feature flag status
- •Credit requests — calculates exactly how much should be credited based on actual vs. billed usage
See Altor resolve a billing dispute in real time
We'll connect to your Stripe and usage data and investigate a billing ticket from your queue — with evidence, not guesswork.
Get a 3-minute walkthrough — no call needed.