Metronome

Billing seems simple at first—it's just a dev script to generate invoices. But then everyone comes knocking. 🤝 RevOps needs to model custom enterprise contracts 📊 Finance wants real-time rev rec and audit-ready exports 🔄 Product needs to iterate on pricing without writing code 📈 Leadership wants usage + revenue dashboards—daily That means billing isn’t a back-office function anymore. It’s your cross-functional revenue engine. To keep up, you need: → A UI for go-to-market teams → APIs for engineers → Automation that keeps all systems in sync Without that balance, billing becomes no one’s domain—and everyone’s blocker. The fastest-growing companies are turning to purpose-built billing solutions work across the org—not just for one team. Find out more about why the tide is turning against in-house billing and how the fastest-growing companies are using purpose-built solutions to keep their competitive edge. Link to the blog in the comments.

🎣 PLG isn’t just for landing small customers. You can use it to land small, then go big within large enterprises. Justin Farris, VP of Product and Monetization at GitLab, and Metronome CEO Scott Woody debunked the common belief that enterprises only buy through sales-led motions (or that SMB only lands through self-service PLG) on the latest episode of Unpack Pricing. They also dig deep into why you should treat pricing like a product, and how that can support both PLG and SLG motions at scale. Listen to the full episode at the link in the comments.

Had the privilege of hosting an incredible dinner with pricing and product leaders from LinkedIn, Klaviyo, Asana, Plaid, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Splunk, HubSpot, Amplitude, and Writer last week! Creating these forums for industry leaders to connect and share insights is what drives innovation in our space. Two fascinating takeaways from the evening: 1️⃣ AI adoption is unanimous among pricing professionals—with the most compelling use case being deal-level pricing and approval workflows. 2️⃣ When transitioning to usage-based pricing (UBP), revenue recognition becomes critical—often dictating the entire pricing strategy. Missed this one? We're planning the next gathering soon! Leave the comment "event" if you're interested in joining our next intimate discussion. We'll add you to our waiting list. Thanks again for joining us, Keith Pradhan, Dan Boren, Megha Sisaudia, Sam Lee, Tamara Maltiel, Jay Sathe, Charlie Jatt, Maggie Bouscaren, Carsten H., and Oliver Roup.

Proud to be Monte Carlo's billing partner and supporting their transition to usage-based pricing. 👏👏👏 Thrilled to work with innovative teams rethinking how they deliver value to customers. Don't miss this session!

🚨In-house billing systems are actually a growth problem. The fastest-growing companies aren’t building their own billing systems anymore. Why? Because sooner or later, every in-house billing system becomes a growth blocker. It slows product launches. It diverts engineering resources. And it turns your smartest people into on-call invoice fire-fighters. We’ve talked to hundreds of teams who’ve lived this story—and the pain is almost always the same: → Pricing changes slow to a crawl → Billing errors or customer escalations eat up precious engineering bandwidth → Engineers are in a perpetual state of red alert, constantly being pulled into last-minute bug fixes This isn’t just a billing problem. It’s a growth problem. Until recently, those problems were your problems, now they’re ours ;) Today, companies like OpenAI, Confluent, and Databricks are running usage-based billing at scale—without building it in-house. Each of these companies realized something critical: Billing ≠ competitive advantage. They also know there are competitive advantages to be had: → Flexible pricing → Real-time usage visibility → Accessible customer insights That’s what the new generation of billing platforms enables. The payoff is huge:  → Launch new pricing experiments without engineering rework → Give customers real-time usage dashboards and spend controls → Close the books faster with automated revenue workflows → Iterate on pricing without friction If you’re spending more time maintaining billing than building your product, it’s time to rethink your approach. My latest post breaks down why even the best in-house systems eventually break, when to start planning a migration (hint: it’s earlier than you think), what to look for in a modern billing platform. And if you’re still not sure whether your system is holding you back, just read the stories of the companies who’ve already made the leap and haven’t even looked back. Link in the comments.

Real-time usage-based billing isn't a finance problem. It's a high-throughput data platform challenge. On paper, billing looks simple: Usage × Price = Invoice In reality? You’re building a mission-critical system that has to process millions of events, in real time, without breaking. Modern customers expect the same transparency they get from AWS: → Real-time usage and spend tracking → Instant alerts on usage limits → Seamless auto-reloads for prepaid credits → Proactive spend controls to avoid surprises And if your system lags? 💸 Fraud slips through 😡 Customers churn from surprise overages 📉 Revenue forecasting goes sideways If your billing system can’t handle scale, precision, or complexity under pressure, you’re not just risking bad invoices. You're risking trust, revenue, and retention. Usage-based billing isn’t back-office ops anymore. It’s infrastructure. Companies like OpenAI, Ideogram, and Confluent get it—they treat billing like the hot path it is. Find out why the fastest-growing companies are turning to purpose-built solutions on the blog linked in the comments.

🌸 Our Spring ‘25 changelog is here! We’ve shipped a fresh set of updates focused on flexibility, transparency, and trust. Highlights include: • Expanded support for contract balance and spend threshold alerts • A new invoice breakdowns API to give customers greater spend transparency • Support for recurring commits and credits and additional commit functionality • The launch of the Metronome Trust Center Check out the full changelog—link in comments!

No matter the startup—whether Seed to (probably) Series C—I have yet to walk in with clean books and the granularity I need to do my job well. Accounting is an afterthought until it isn’t, but it remains a crucial function. While our world is rapidly evolving thanks to new agentic tools, until someone actually shows me how they're using an agent to book JEs and reconcile with zero human touch, I'll just have to rely on some truly great humans in the meantime. Therefore, I am hiring for Metronome's first internal accountant, to help build our accounting team. https://lnkd.in/eiKZsx7V

Join me, Josh, and Madhavan for a rollicking discussion on whether outcome-based pricing makes sense for your startup! Sign-up in the comments.

Your billing system was never built to grow with you. Most in-house billing starts as a scrappy MVP, built to rate events and send invoices, and that’s about it. But if you’re scaling on usage-based pricing, that "quick fix" becomes a long-term liability. Every new product, contract, or pricing model adds more duct tape to your ad-hoc solution: ⚠️ New tiers? Patch the pricing table. ⚠️ Enterprise deals? Spin up custom logic. ⚠️ PLG motion? Rewrite everything (again). The system gets brittle. Engineers are stuck firefighting, not innovating. 🙅 The result? A system no one wants to touch—but everyone depends on. If your billing is still a patchwork of "just-for-now" fixes, it might be time to ask: Are we building for today, or for scale? Leading companies like OpenAI, Databricks, and Confluent don’t wait for a meltdown. They move to purpose-built billing before it breaks on them. Find out why the fastest-growing companies are ditching in-house billing, and how you know when it’s time for you to do the same in the blog post linked in the comments.