- DATE:
- AUTHOR:
- The Metronome team
Threshold billing and auto-recharge
Metronome now supports threshold billing, giving customers more options to balance customer adoption and company safeguards for their PLG motion.
What’s new:
Payment-gated commits: manually create a commit which is gated on successful payment collection. This can also be used to power threshold billing and hybrid subscription models where payment is required before access. See docs here.
Spend threshold billing: bill customers when they hit a defined spend threshold. This option balances low customer friction with automated company safeguards against runaway usage or fraud. See docs here.
How it works:
Set an invoice spend threshold on the contract via the create contract flow.
When a user hits their spend threshold, you are alerted via webhook and a prepaid commit is issued, bring the total outstanding spend for the customer back to $0.
Configure whether the release of the commit should be gated on successful payment collection.
Example: "User hit $100 of usage, trigger an invoice. Payment is successful, release the commit to return outstanding spend to $0."
Auto-recharge (prepaid balance thresholds): automatically charge for and top up a customer’s balance when it falls below a threshold. This minimizes potential fraud risk via a prepaid model while ensuring uninterrupted product access for end users. See docs here and view our launch guide for prepaid credits here.
How it works:
On contract creation, configure the recharge threshold that triggers a top up and the amount the customer should be recharged to.
When a user hits the threshold amount, you are alerted via webhook and a prepaid commit is issued.
Configure whether the release of the commit should be gated based on successful payment collection.
Example: "User’s balance fell below $20, automatically attempt payment to bring it to $50. Payment is successful, release the commit."
These features are available to all customers on Contracts. To learn more about common billing models and how to evaluate them for your business, see our blog post here.