Startup Aims To Help Software Companies Shift To Usage-Based Pricing Models
The startup Metronome "claims to have developed a billing and data infrastructure platform that is capable of 'reliably' processing data at scale so that usage-based companies can iterate on business models without code changes," reports TechCrunch. "It does this by providing businesses with real-time APIs for their customers' usage and billing data." From the report: Two former Dropbox employees -- Kevin Liu and Scott Woody -- who met at the company after selling their own respective startups founded Metronome in 2020. They came up with the concept after speaking with hundreds of companies that they say "shared the common pain of making usage-based billing work at scale." "This change we're seeing in the software market is mapped to the value of what a customer is getting out of the product," said Liu. "And that has all been accelerated by the market success of the likes of Twilio, Snowflake and AWS, who have proven just how successful those models can be." Metronome claims that its offering allows companies to "quickly and effortlessly launch, iterate and scale new business models with billing infrastructure that works at any size and stage," according to Liu. The key, the company claims, is that companies are able to avoid designing around billing limitations. Customers include Cockroach Labs, Starburst and Truework. A16z General Partner Martin Casado believes that the entire software industry is moving toward "more granular and expressive pricing models, starting with usage-based pricing." "Building a system to support that is an incredibly difficult technical challenge," he told TechCrunch via email. "Kevin and Scott have the background and appreciation for the problem, and have built the only system that can support the scale, correctness, and uptimes required to handle billing for leading software companies." The company "has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)," adds TechCrunch. "Presently, Metronome has 20 employees and plans to spend the bulk of its new capital toward hiring, particularly across its R&D and go to market teams."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.