With the glow of the upcoming year on the horizon, this is one of my favorite times—relative calm after a busy and exciting 12 months at Metronome. 

Change is the operative word here. AI is driving a generational shift in how value is delivered to end-customers, and we can all see the first-order changes to how products work. At Metronome we’re also seeing the second-order effect of AI on the business models that govern the software world.

Inside, we’ve also experienced massive, important changes. As we close out this year and look forward to what’s on the horizon, here’s a look back at some of Metronome’s biggest milestones and a glimpse into the future of pricing.

Stepping into a new role

Kevin Liu and I founded Metronome together, but four years into our journey at Metronome, we came to an unexpected decision point. Startup life can take a toll on your health and after 4 years, we made the decision for me to step down as CTO and up as CEO—something I hadn’t expected but felt like the right move. This transition has been a learning curve on so many levels, and having a strong team around me is something I become more grateful for every day.

Announcing our Series B

As if becoming CEO wasn’t enough excitement to start the year with, we also announced our Series B, lead by NEA and supported by a16z and General Catalyst. This new investment allows us to accelerate our ambitious 2024 roadmap and continue delivering a world-class billing experience for our customers. 

Launching Metronome 2.0

2024 reinforced a core belief we’ve held since day one: billing isn’t just a backend tool anymore. In the era of usage-based pricing and AI-driven services, billing is deeply integrated into the product experience and is a critical growth lever for companies. It’s how businesses can iterate faster, deliver value more transparently, and unlock new growth opportunities.

This year, we launched Metronome 2.0, a major evolution of our platform that reimagines what billing infrastructure can be for modern businesses.

Here are a few highlights:

Launch products faster with ultimate pricing flexibility
We enable you to build and launch products quickly with support for self-serve models, enterprise contracts, and cloud marketplaces. Our platform gives you the flexibility to align pricing with customer value using SQL-based metrics and dimensional pricing structures.

Connect billing to the product experience
We make it easy to integrate billing into your product experience, providing real-time usage dashboards, configurable spend controls, and alerts. With full API support, we allow you to automate purchasing and billing workflows as you scale.

Act on usage and spend data
We give companies real-time, granular billing insights to make smarter business decisions. Teams can filter usage, analyze margins, track revenue, and integrate with Salesforce for clear visibility into customer usage and spend.

Iterate on pricing without friction
We allow you to manage pricing updates seamlessly with centralized rate cards and support for custom contracts. Schedule updates to take effect instantly, in the future, or retroactively—all from a single source of truth.

Launching the Unpack Pricing podcast

Let’s face it: pricing is hard. There’s no shortage of high-level theory about it, but finding practical, real-world insights? That’s rare.

This year, we launched Unpack Pricing, a podcast dedicated to bridging that gap. Through candid interviews with executives, pricing leaders, and operators, we’re unpacking what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to scaling usage-based pricing, building PLG motions, and navigating complex pricing transformations.

Guests like Jesse Miller, VP of Product Growth at Kong, Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, and Sam Lee, VP of Pricing Strategy and Product Operations at HubSpot, have shared invaluable insights. I hope these conversations inspire and inform you as much as they have me.

Looking ahead: 2025 pricing predictions

Having looked into the crystal ball with the investors, customers, industry leaders, and with my own teams, here are a few things I’m predicting we’ll see as we move into 2025.

AI will force SaaS businesses into outcome- and usage-based pricing

As more businesses across industries adopt AI agents to gain efficiencies in areas like customer service, expect to see more AI agent–companies turn to resolution-based pricing models. Companies like Zendesk already charge based on successful ticket resolution, and as customers get used to paying only for successful outcomes, broad AI solutions—regardless of industry or application—will likely become a distant memory, and outcome-based pricing will rule the day.

Lack of preparation will lead to increases in pricing missteps

If you’re reading this, it’s probably not news to you that pricing is complex, easy to get wrong, and also easily underestimated. Companies that adopt usage-based pricing without planning well in advance, communicating clearly and frequently with customers, and carefully phasing new pricing in will face steep challenges. The past two years highlighted these painful truths with both Canva and Unity Technologies, who faced harsh backlash after turbulent pricing updates. As we speed toward wider UBP adoption, I expect we’ll unfortunately see more examples like these for the unprepared.

Pricing transformation’s speed will challenge both companies and investors

To avoid pricing-related customer backlash, businesses will likely move to launching new products with new prices, instead of attempting a retrofit. The faster you launch with pricing tightly aligned to value, the more likely you’ll pull ahead of the pack. This quick and constant iteration isn’t just a challenge for us in tech; it’s also something Wall Street has to get their arms around. UBP makes revenue forecasting trickier, and investors are seeing this challenge as more companies adopt UBP. Knowing that this is a challenge for both camps, this is our collective chance to educate investors so they can anticipate and understand the changes they’ll see in earnings reports.

Every team will be a growth team

The culture shift consumption-based pricing models require is real. As AI drives us toward faster UBP adoption, net revenue retention (NRR) will be even more important, and post-sale engagement will accelerate. The outcome? Every team—from data science to account management, from product to growth—will focus on growing NRR. Emphasis and energy will center on identifying and nurturing high-value customers, and teams across the business will share accountability for maintaining high-quality customer engagement.

The shifts happening across industries right now can be challenging, there’s no doubt about that. But having a better understanding of what’s coming toward us is the best way we can get a handle on what the best decisions are for both us and our customers. I hope these insights can be helpful for you and your teams as you wind down for the year.

See you in 2025

We’ve done a lot and grown a lot in 2024, and everyone here at Metronome wants to thank you for being with us along the way. If you’ve worked with our team, touched base to see how we can help with your pricing challenges, if you’ve read these posts or have listened to a podcast episode or two, we want to thank you for being part of our 2024. 

From all of us Metrognomes to you, here’s to all that’s to come in 2025.