How a lean team unlocked revenue growth, built trust at scale, and reduced fraud.
Salad, the world's largest distributed cloud network, is on a mission to democratize cloud computing by unlocking the world’s latent compute. With more than 2 million registered suppliers, the company enables those users to monetize their idle computing resources while providing businesses with cost-effective access to computing power, including high-demand GPU resources for AI and machine learning workloads.
But that two-sided marketplace also exposed Salad to risk. With usage-based pricing and an open, self-serve model, the company needed safeguards to protect against potential abuse without slowing down customer growth.
Earlier this year, Salad transitioned from in-arrears billing to a prepaid model with auto-recharge. The results they saw were fast and meaningful: their operations team regained valuable bandwidth, fraud dropped below 1%, and new users can now scale faster.
Billing in arrears was holding growth back
As Salad began onboarding more customers in the AI space, they realized that their in-arrears billing model introduced two major challenges:
- Manual workload: Salad’s lean ops team of 3 was spending half the month monitoring customer usage and manually billing high-usage accounts throughout the month to reduce payment collection risk exposure. This wasn't sustainable—especially as Salad launched a product-led growth (PLG) motion.
- Higher fraud risk: With in-arrears billing, some customers racked up large tabs before Salad could intervene. In early months, fraud reached as high as 15–20% of billed usage.
“We got in this really difficult situation where our ops team wasn’t supposed to be doing finance as their full-time jobs, but they were spending literally half or more of the month just focused on finance,” said Sean Miller, Head of Growth. “It wasn’t scalable.”
Salad needed a better approach—one that would take pressure off the ops team, unlock customer growth, and reduce fraud.
To the rescue: Prepaid billing with auto recharge
The team rolled out Metronome’s auto-recharge feature to shift Salad from in-arrears billing to a prepaid credit model. Customers now fund their accounts in advance and are automatically topped up when balances run low.
This change brought three key benefits:
- Operational efficiency: The billing process is fully automated, freeing ops to focus on strategic initiatives.
- Customer trust and scale: Customers can scale workloads with confidence, without manually reloading their credit balance or suffering from service interruption.
- Fraud prevention: Salad is now seeing that high-risk paid-in-arrears behavior is gone, since usage is now gated by prepayment,.
“Offering prepaid credits with auto-recharge built customer trust in us as a compute provider,” Sean said. “Customers now spin up hundreds of GPUs and scale to production workloads without extensive KYC (Know Your Customer) friction, and our business has safeguards for fraudulent accounts.”
Results: Safer, faster, and more scalable growth
The impact of the shift to prepaid billing has been real:
- Fraud fell from 15–20% to under 1%
- 75% of Salad’s customers adopted auto-recharge
- Ops team cut their billing workload significantly–saving 20-30 hours each month
- Large customers now prepay 3–6 months of compute upfront, improving the company’s cash flow.
The new system also unlocked new revenue. By offering volume discounts on prepaid credits, Salad saw an increase in upfront spend from top customers—sometimes in the six-figure range. These prepayments improved cash flow and helped reduce Salad’s burn rate. Following the success of prepaid credits, Salad is now building out more structured volume discount programs and exploring committed usage features—all on top of Metronome’s flexible billing infrastructure.
Treating billing as part of the product
For infrastructure startups trying to scale product-led growth in a high-cost, high-risk environment, billing isn’t just backend plumbing—it’s a core part of your product experience. Salad’s shift to prepaid credits with Metronome enabled trust, efficiency, and—ultimately—scale.
As Sean puts it, “Product-led growth at scale requires finding the right balance between ease of use and operational risk. Metronome gives us the flexibility and billing infrastructure to implement safeguards that fit our needs—without compromising the customer experience.”
This is the latest development in Salad's partnership with Metronome. Read the story of how they got up and running with Metronome in <2 weeks—and gained effortless pricing iterations and real-time insights for customers.
