---
title: Glossary
description: Key terms used in Tanso products and documentation
last_updated: 2026-05-13
---

# Glossary

## Cost Attribution
Linking AI compute costs (LLM API calls, GPU time) to the specific customer and feature that triggered them.

## Cost Alert
A notification triggered when a customer's margin drops below a configured threshold.

## Customer Reference ID
Your system's unique identifier for a customer, used to link Tanso data to your user records.

## Entitlement
A runtime access check. Before executing a request, the system verifies the customer's plan grants access to the requested feature. Denied requests never hit compute.

## Feature Key
A unique string identifier for a billable capability (e.g., `ai-summarization`, `pdf-generation`). Used in entitlement checks and usage events.

## Gross Margin
(Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold) / Revenue. In AI SaaS, COGS is dominated by model inference costs.

## MCP (Model Context Protocol)
An open protocol for connecting AI agents to external tools and data sources. Tanso exposes billing and pricing tools via MCP servers.

## Metering
Counting usage events (API calls, tokens, compute time) for billing and analytics.

## Usage Event
A recorded instance of a customer using a feature. Contains: customer ID, feature key, timestamp, and optional properties (model, tokens, cost).

## Usage-Based Pricing
Charging customers based on consumption rather than flat subscription fees. Common models: per-API-call, per-token, per-seat.