Customer stories
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Apollo

Apollo

adopts usage-based pricing

with Metronome

Metronome helped Apollo implement a new pricing model for the GraphOS product launch in time for their annual developer conference.

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Apollo is the all-purpose data hub for developers. They recently launched GraphOS, a cloud platform allowing developers to build, connect and scale supergraphs.

Industry

Devtools

Size

250 employees

Challenge

Apollo was launching GraphOS at their annual developer summit. To encourage adoption, they wanted a new usage-based pricing model that was reliable and flexible.

Results

Apollo saved 6+ engineering months and hit an aggressive launch timeline. They have full confidence in their billing system, from metering to rating and invoicing.

“Metronome’s usage-based billing infrastructure enables us to monetize in a way that maps to customer value and aligns with our business.”

Kaushik Sahoo
Engineering Manager, Apollo

Apollo is the leading end-to-end supergraph platform, helping businesses unify all cloud data and services into a single connected map. Apollo recently launched GraphOS, a complete cloud platform that lets developers build, connect, and scale any supergraph.

We spoke with Apollo engineering manager, Kaushik Sahoo, to learn how Metronome helped Apollo adopt a usage-based pricing model. Kaushik’s team works on all the pricing, packaging, growth, and monetization technology at Apollo. He shared with us how Metronome helped implement new pricing for the GraphOS launch in time for their annual developer conference, GraphQL Summit.

Challenge

Launching a new product with usage-based pricing

GraphOS allows product and engineering teams to create applications in a quick and scalable way. The Apollo team knew they wanted to make it easy for developers to adopt GraphOS and decided to price on usage, rather than a traditional seat-based model, to encourage more developers within an organization to try out the platform.

“As we move to a cloud offering, we want to unlock flexibility with how we monetize. The problem we're solving with Metronome is how to set up an easy and efficient way to price various types of ingestion events. There are a lot of unique cases and pricing strategically for each one of those cases is a complicated thing to do.”

Implementing new pricing on a tight timeline

GraphOS was the keynote product announcement at GraphQL Summit and Kaushik’s team was on a tight deadline to have a new pricing model implemented before the event. Usage-based pricing was a new concept at the company and the team needed to ensure they had billing infrastructure that could support their pricing model today and in the future.

“Usage-based pricing was new to Apollo and there was a lot of granularity we had to work through on plan start dates, plan end dates, and invoicing. We didn’t want to worry about easily creating plans, associating the plans with customers, and changing pricing. We wanted to focus on the product and how it’s priced and work with a strategic partner who could support the billing infrastructure.”

Solution

Trusted pricing advisors providing guided implementation

Given the strategic importance of the GraphOS product launch, Kaushik and his team needed a partner that had deep usage-based pricing knowledge and could provide hands-on support.

“The Metronome team has been incredible. Our Metronome implementation was seamless–whenever we needed to discuss our implementation, the Metronome team was always available. There was a lot that was new for us, and the team was responsive and helpful in advising us through various pricing scenarios. Metronome also has clear-cut API documentation that allowed us to get up to speed faster.”

Powerful and flexible billing infrastructure

Apollo’s engineering team trusts Metronome to handle metering, rating, and invoicing accurately. They’ve freed up valuable development time to focus on their core product and pricing experimentation.

“Without Metronome, we would have had to build this ourselves and set up a rudimentary usage-based pricing configuration with Stripe. Metronome takes care of our usage-based billing infrastructure in a robust and scalable way–and integrates with Stripe.”

Billing designed to handle usage and billing data with care

Apollo also has peace of mind when it comes to auditability and resiliency with Metronome powering their billing. The assurance that usage data sent to Metronome is being handled properly is critical.

“The consistency and resiliency with Metronome’s systems and the amount of effort the team has put behind audit trails for events, as well as failovers, is reassuring. Being able to trust that everything ingested from us is done in a secure and resilient way is the biggest priority for us.”

Results

6 engineering months saved

By implementing their billing infrastructure with Metronome, Apollo saved over 6 engineering months–making it possible to hit an aggressive launch timeline.

“Metronome gave us a plug-and-play pricing solution, so that we could accurately convert product usage into invoices for our customers. We had 4 months to get billing implemented for this product. Most of that time was spent on plan modeling and pricing modeling. Metronome made the technical implementation simple and saved our team of three engineers significant time and helped us beat our deadline.”

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If you’re interested in learning more about Metronome and how we can support your billing needs, you can contact us here.

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