Commit / Commitment
A minimum spend or volume a customer agrees to for a period, typically at a discount, with overage billed beyond it.
A commit (or commitment) is a minimum spend or usage volume a customer agrees to for a set period — typically a quarter or a year — usually in exchange for a discounted rate, with any usage beyond it billed as overage.
It matters on both sides of the deal: the customer gets pricing predictability and a lower effective rate in exchange for locking in volume, while the seller gets revenue predictability to plan around instead of relying purely on variable usage that could swing quarter to quarter.
In practice, a commitment is tracked continuously against live usage throughout the period, not just reconciled at renewal — the account team needs to know weeks in advance whether a customer is trending under their commit (a renewal risk worth a conversation) or over it (an expansion opportunity), not discover either one for the first time when the contract is up.
The common pitfall is only checking commit attainment at the end of the period, once it's too late to act on the signal — a customer running well under their commitment for months, discovered only at renewal, is a much harder save than the same shortfall flagged and addressed with two months of runway left.