How to bill clients for API costs and software licenses
Bundling software licenses into a single per-user rate stops clients from seeing individual tool costs and questioning the value of your services. However, because some AI providers restrict reselling, agencies are forced to let clients pay the providers directly, exposing those exact costs. This visibility leads to exhausting, repetitive conversations where you have to constantly defend your service fees against line-item software expenses.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- People have been saying this in most months since August 2026.
- This comes up 133.8× more often in r/msp than across the site as a whole.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Having the client create their own account and payment method for cloud services and add the freelancer as a userDid this help you?
- 2Treating the cost as part of doing business and factoring it into the project quoteDid this help you?
- 3Passing the cost directly to the client as a required subscription or add-onDid this help you?
- 4Itemizing licenses at list price on a separate line item from managed support feesDid this help you?
- 5Billing on a per-device model rather than per-userDid this help you?
- 6Passing through software subscriptions month-to-month to avoid long-term liabilityDid this help you?
- 7Letting the client pay the vendor directly for licenses and charging only a flat management or retainer feeDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“For any Microsoft product I always do month to month even with the lower margins. I’m not going to be left holding the bag for months.”source ↗
“The reason people build in the m365 base license is that clients feel for the $X you charge a month, that's "just for the person to have email". It's not, we know that, and it's tiring explaining it over and over again and getting different answers from the same person depending on the mood they're in.”source ↗
“A mate who's run an MSP for years says always bundle the licence into one per-user price. His view: once clients see they're paying Microsoft $31 a user for Copilot, they start asking why they're paying you on top.”source ↗
“Some clients want Claude or ChatGPT instead. Anthropic and OpenAI don't allow reselling without approval, so those clients pay them directly and I only bill the service, which is exactly the setup my mate warns about.”source ↗
“How do you all bill clients for AI API costs on their projects?”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2Should you charge clients when you switch their software tools?
- 4Why am I paying a monthly fee to sell software for commission?
- 3How to market paid software without a free version
- 3Why is business invoicing and deposit billing so messy?
- 2Why can't I talk to a real person on enterprise software support?
- 8Per endpoint software pricing is too expensive