For years, SaaS companies have claimed to put the customer first. But when you look at how software is actually bought, sold, and billed today, a different story has started to emerge. The truth is simple and uncomfortable: customer experience is broken, and it’s often pricing and billing that break it.

The stakes have never been higher. As our recent AI Pricing Field Report highlighted, launching AI has become a C-level imperative. Teams are racing to align unpredictable AI costs with customer value, often under pressure from CEOs and boards. Usage-based pricing is now a survival mechanism to avoid margin blowups. Still, without the right billing infrastructure, these moves often add confusion rather than clarity.

Where CX breaks down

In theory, pricing should mirror the value customers get from a product. In practice, though, most SaaS companies are still using these two common models:

• Selling seats: A legacy subscription model where revenue scales with the number of users, regardless of actual value. Great for predictability, terrible for the AI economy, where underlying COGs are high and customer usage varies widely. 
• Selling credits: A simple credit-based model meant to bridge the gap. The downside is that credits introduce confusion that most customers don’t want, turning value into accounting calculations. Credits force customers to try to understand limits they never thought about before and can feel arbitrary (or, even worse, punitive).
  

Neither model on its own solves the problem. Worse, attempts to combine them (seat licenses + credit pools, pooled vs. per-seat credits, auto-recharges, seat-block sizing) often create confusion and frustration for end users—especially without clear communication or in-product usage clarity. The result is that billing is now a frontline customer experience problem.

Billing fragmentation: The hidden CX killer

From our interviews with finance and monetization leaders, a consistent theme emerges: hybrid pricing challenges GTM teams and actually breaks existing billing systems.

• Two stacks, no consistency. PLG teams rely on Stripe. It works for simple seat-based checkout flows but offers little visibility into costs once credit consumption goes beyond a single invoice total. SLG teams are often in worse shape. They juggle CPQ, ERP, and homegrown billing stitched together with spreadsheets.For customers, getting visibility into billing means opening engineering tickets and running SQL queries.
• Limited pricing flexibility. Because billing rules live in different systems (or worse, in code), changing packaging or experimenting with new AI features can take months. One monetization lead described the time to market for new SKUs as their biggest blocker. 
• Opaque meters and audit gaps. Many teams rely on homegrown metering with no audit trail. Finance leaders often struggle to explain why customers see the bills they do—a credibility killer in high-stakes enterprise deals. As one finance exec bluntly put it:

“Our entire AI pricing logic lives in product code. Finance sees a number in Looker once a month. No one can explain how it got there.”

This is more than just an internal headache. Billing fragmentation becomes customer fragmentation. When billing feels inconsistent, slow, or impossible to reconcile with usage, customers lose trust. Billing fragmentation becomes CX fragmentation, and expansion slows to a crawl.

What you can learn from usage-native companies

If legacy models are broken, where do we look for inspiration? The best lessons come from usage-native companies like Datadog, Snowflake, and Twilio.

These companies have flipped the script:

• Value-aligned pricing: Customers pay for what they actually use, not arbitrary seat counts.
• Real-time visibility: Usage data is easily visible for customers, enabling cost awareness and self-management.
• Infrastructure-first billing: Billing is a shared internal platform that connects GTM, product, and finance.
  

This approach transforms billing from a blocker into a growth driver. It enables transparent experimentation with pricing, faster time-to-market, and better customer trust. It also means finance can move from reactive spreadsheet patching to proactive monetization strategy.

How to fix CX: Rethinking billing as infrastructure

The transition to usage-based (especially AI-driven) pricing requires fully re-architecting billing:

1. Unify data flows: Connect usage events to customers across both PLG and SLG motions.
2. Consolidate billing logic: Move away from duplicated, opaque rules buried in product and finance systems.
3. Adopt sidecar infrastructure: Introduce a usage-based billing system designed to handle dynamic, usage-based commitments alongside legacy stacks.
4. Create a single source of truth: Pricing, usage, and spend data must be visible to both customers and internal teams.
   

As we’ve seen at Metronome, this phased approach allows teams to start with the hardest problem—complex usage-based enterprise contracts—and gradually expand to unify all monetization under one infrastructure. The outcome is operational efficiency plus a restored customer experience: clear, fair, and value-aligned billing.

Fixing CX starts with fixing billing

If your CX is broken, it may be because your billing is broken. Selling seats ignores usage, and selling credits confuses customers. But usage-native companies prove there’s a better way: billing that mirrors value, provides transparency, and scales with both product and customer needs.

If software companies want to fix customer experience, they need to stop treating billing as an afterthought—and start treating it as product infrastructure.

How Metronome supports hybrid models

This is where Metronome comes in. Our infrastructure was built to handle the messy reality of hybrid models, where subscriptions, seats, credits, and usage all need to coexist.

• Flexible modeling: Define pricing at any layer—per seat, per credit, or per event—and adapt as your strategy evolves.
• Unified credit ledgers: Consolidate credit pools across PLG and SLG motions, so finance can recognize revenue accurately and customers can see spend clearly.
• Real-time visibility: Give customers clear, in-product views of usage and credit consumption, reducing anxiety and building trust.
• Modular rollout: Introduce usage-based billing where it matters most, like AI features or enterprise contracts, and expand gradually. Metronome integrates with your existing systems so you can prove value before scaling.

By turning billing into a shared, flexible platform, Metronome helps teams make hybrid models work in both theory and practice.

Ready to turn billing from a customer pain point into a growth driver? Get in touch to see how Metronome’s flexible, usage-based infrastructure helps you launch hybrid models, unify billing, and deliver the transparency today’s customers expect.