Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about the challenges of pricing—and specifically why usage-based pricing is so tough to get right. These insights come from my time leading growth and monetization engineering at Dropbox and now powering billing for the fastest-growing software companies at Metronome.

If you missed the series, here are the links: 

• The hidden pain behind launches
• Why usage-based pricing is so hard to get right
• Usage based pricing’s double-edged sword 
• The heart of decision making

I’ve covered the challenges, but the more important question remains: what’s the solution? 

That brings us to the launch of Metronome 2.0 today—a major milestone in Metronome’s mission to turn billing from a bottleneck into a growth lever.

Updating our priors

When Kevin and I started Metronome back in 2019, usage-based pricing was still an emerging concept, pioneered by companies like Snowflake, AWS, and Twilio. Fast forward five years, and it’s now a go-to model for software companies of all stripes. The rise of AI-powered services has only accelerated this shift, with resource-intensive workloads demanding pricing models that align more closely with customer value.

"Update your priors" has always been a guiding principle at Metronome. We’ve learned so much from working with forward-thinking companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, NVIDIA, and others. Their needs have shown us how the requirements for billing have evolved, and what the future will look like for companies to launch and monetize their products more quickly.

In the world of usage-based pricing, billing is no longer just a step in the quote-to-cash process—it’s deeply integrated into the product development cycle.

Now, revenue depends directly on product usage, necessitating that companies have flexibility to monetize features, adjust pricing dynamically, and provide continuous transparent value to their customers. Billing is the underlying infrastructure that supports this and Metronome offers a flexible, modular architecture so you can ship pricing updates as quickly as you ship new features.  

So, what’s included in Metronome 2.0? 

Launch products faster with ultimate pricing flexibility:
We’re enabling you to build and launch products faster, with the flexibility to handle self-serve models, complex enterprise contracts, cloud marketplaces, and more. Whether it’s SQL-based billable metrics or dimensional pricing structures, our platform gives you the tools to design your pricing to best align with customer value. 

Connect billing to the product experience:
We’ve invested in making it easier to connect billing to your product experience and give customers real-time usage and spend insights. Build powerful in-product billing dashboards and empower end-users with configurable spend controls and alerts. And with full API support, you can automate your entire purchase and billing process as you scale.

Act on usage and spend data:
In a usage-based pricing model, data is the new oil. We give you real-time insights to make strategic business decisions. Metronome provides granular billing data that allows teams to filter and export usage, analyze margins, and track daily revenue. We also integrate with Salesforce, so go-to-market teams have visibility into customer usage and spend within the tools they already use.

Iterate on pricing without friction:
With centralized rate cards and support for fully customized contracts, Metronome lets you manage pricing updates efficiently. Whether you’re rolling out new discounts, updating list pricing, or managing enterprise contracts, you’ll have a single source of truth for pricing across all customers. You can schedule pricing updates to take effect instantly, in the future, or retroactively, eliminating any last-minute scrambling.

See our Metronome 2.0 changelog here for more details on what we've released.

What’s next 

Metronome 2.0 is a big step forward, but in every way we are just getting started. Our roadmap is full of features to give you greater pricing flexibility, help your users get maximum value from usage-based pricing, and convert pricing insights into strategic action. 

A note of gratitude  

I want to thank all our customers for choosing Metronome to be your billing partner–your trust, partnership, and feedback has led us to where we are today, and continues to shape where we go from here.

I also want to thank our employees and investors for taking the leap on a big idea. 5 years later that bet looks prescient, but I can’t possibly thank you enough for your trust, time, and conviction.

Scott Woody
Founder & CEO, Metronome

--‍