Metronome

🔒 Billing data is essentially worthless if your teams can’t access it. Pricing touches everything in modern software companies: Product strategy, sales execution, customer support, finance forecasting. When those teams have fragmented or limited access to billing data, they’re forced to make decisions in isolation, and may not even be aware of the blind spots these limitations force on them. So things move forward, sometimes erratically, with each misaligned decision adding just a little more friction to your progress. But when every team can access a single, real-time source of truth for billing data, everything moves faster: → Product can see if an experiment drove revenue → Sales can quote with confidence → Finance can forecast based on actual usage → Support can resolve issues without a ticket escalation The companies moving fastest right now operate with clarity and a clear line of sight to what’s working, what can be improved, and what can take things to the next level. Shared access to real-time, trusted data is a serious competitive edge. Read more about why pricing is now a product discipline in the post linked in the comments.

💡 The biggest constraint as we enter the Value Era is infrastructure. Any pricing assumptions we had before have been broken: → AI might process 50 emails for one customer, and 5,000 for another. → Document tools will handle 100 pages for startups, and 100,000 pages for enterprises on the same day. Static plans can't capture AI and usage value with variances like those. So what we’re seeing now is that companies are splitting into two categories: → Winners who adapt pricing in real-time → Stragglers stuck with manual, months-long processes Legacy billing systems force binary choices because they can't handle complexity. In contrast, modern pricing infrastructure makes packaging dynamic: modular components that can be configured, combined, and updated without code. When value delivery becomes continuous and dynamic, flexible packaging becomes the foundation for competitive advantage. Our monetization operating model whitepaper launches in August. Read today’s article and get early access through the links in the comments.

The design industry has been weird, exciting, and mildly existential lately - and my work at Metronome hasn’t been any different. So naturally, I wrote a blog post about it. When I joined Metronome, I knew billing would be complex, but I didn’t expect it to feel so human. Behind every rate misfire or broken workflow is someone frustrated, confused, or trying to explain the unexplainable. What hit me hardest wasn’t the math. It was realizing how deeply design affects trust, clarity, and confidence. A missed signal in the UI can create hours of support pain. A rigid workflow can stall whole teams. This post is about how we’ve been quietly rewriting the role of design - not to chase polish, but to help people move faster, feel in control, and actually trust the systems they use. Also yes, there’s a section on vibe-coding. Link in Comments #productdesign #vibecoding #ai #usagebasedpricing

💰“We’re not monetizing AI to juice revenue. We’re monetizing to avoid eating $10K of costs on a $500 plan.” 📉 “Usage stopped not because of price, but because admins didn’t trust they’d stay in budget.” 🤔 “Our finance team likes credits. Our customers don’t know what a credit does.” 👆 You're hearing SaaS leaders speaking candidly in our new 2025 Field Report on AI Pricing. This report is based on interviews with monetization, product, and GTM leads across AI-native and AI-adopting software companies. Some of what we found: → Pricing AI features is a C-suite risk management decision. → Most teams start with credits, but almost no one thinks they’re the endgame. → Unpredictability (not imprecision) is the # 1 blocker for enterprise adoption. → UBP forces teams to fully re-architect billing; tweaking plans isn’t enough. → Sales teams need more than a new SKU. They need a narrative. If you’re navigating how to monetize AI in a hybrid pricing world or wondering what your peers are struggling with behind the scenes, we hope this report can save you some painful iteration. Link in the comments.

Our seed pitch deck from 5 years ago featured three marquee logos that we’d one day be able to serve: Databricks, Snowflake, and Confluent. Two out of three ain’t bad ;) We just shipped a case study on how to do usage-based monetization the right way. It’s a deep dive on every lesson we learned working alongside Confluent: from speeding up product launches to designing sales incentives to driving NRR to making sure your revenue is accurate, timely and public-company compliant. If you’re interested in learning how the best ubp businesses monetize - don’t hesitate to reach out!

Yes, scaling pains are about infrastructure. They're also about *speed.* At Confluent, every new product or pricing update used to trigger a flurry of engineering tickets, contract rewrites, and days of post-processing for finance. Their homegrown billing system had powered them to IPO, but now it was slowing them down. So they made the call:  🛑 Stop treating billing like a back-office cost center.  🚀 Start treating it like infrastructure for product velocity. The results were something to write home about: → 50%+ faster billing execution during product dev → 25% drop in engineering on-call time → Dynamic pricing + incentives that scale across enterprise and PLG → Month-end close: faster, cleaner, less painful What changed was the way they thought about billing as part of their go-to-market stack. “It really enabled us to do things we couldn’t before,” said Mandar Kulkarni, Director of Product at Confluent. “That’s the biggest impact—unlocking business strategies, not just reducing costs.” This is how teams should be thinking. Read the full breakdown at the link in the comments.

Big thanks to Confluent for the ongoing partnership! From day one, Metronome knew real-time billing couldn’t depend on batch processing. That’s why we built our data architecture on Confluent, streaming billions of events daily and processing tens of thousands of invoices per second without breaking a sweat. As a mutual customer and design partner, Confluent has been instrumental in shaping our solutions, helping us deliver unmatched performance at scale. This real-time infrastructure ensures our customers’ growth never compromises trust. We're proud to work alongside Confluent, letting us focus on building the product while they handle the complexity behind the scenes.

🚢 Changing pricing often feels like launching a new product (even though it shouldn’t). It might feel like every pricing experiment turns into: → Weeks of cross-functional coordination → Custom logic buried in dashboards → Stress-testing RevRec 🙏 And a silent prayer to the billing gods before launch Typical results: Teams delay changes, ideas die in backlog backwoods, and revenue exits stage left. In the latest post from our Pricing Is a Product series, we cover: → Why pricing agility matters more than ever → Common blockers teams face → What “programmable pricing” actually looks like in practice Because we hate to say it, but if it’s easier to ship a feature flag than a pricing update . . . something’s broken. Full post linked in the comments.

📈 Selling your first enterprise commit contract? It’s a big milestone—and a complex one. From payment schedule to rollover, there's a lot to get right (and even more that can go sideways). We wrote a practical guide to help you structure deals that: 💰Secure predictable revenue 🌱Give customers room to grow 🧮 Won’t break your billing or finance systems Perfect for GTM and RevOps teams standing up enterprise sales for the first time. 👉 Find the guide in the comment.

🎬 The era of seat-based pricing is ending. Here's what's replacing it. Software has evolved through three distinct eras of value creation: 📦 Software Era: Value = features in the box ☁️ Access Era: Value = cloud subscriptions ⚡ Value Era: Value = work performed and outcomes delivered It’s probably not news to you that AI has accelerated this shift. When your product autonomously writes code, analyzes data, or makes decisions, charging per user seat makes as much sense as charging lawyers by the number of law books they can access (regardless of whether they read them . . . ). Most companies are trying to duct tape usage pricing onto access-era infrastructure. The bad news is that those billing systems, pricing logic, and operational workflows weren't designed for dynamic value delivery that’s in play today. The companies winning today are rebuilding their entire monetization infrastructure for the Value Era. We just published a deep dive on this shift, digging into why traditional billing breaks in an AI-driven world and what it means if you’re not keeping up with these changes. 👉 Check it out at the link in the comments.