When Cribl, the leader in enabling open observability, was preparing to launch their new cloud service, Cribl.Cloud, the team knew they wanted to adopt modern cloud pricing with a consumption-based model.

We spoke with Senior Director of Product Management at Cribl, Nick Tankersley, and Director of Product Management for Cribl.Cloud, Manish Bhaskar, to learn about their journey to adopting a usage-based pricing model. You can also read Manish’s blog post on Cribl’s pricing transition here.

To launch a new product with a new pricing model, Cribl needed a back-end system that could support real-time, usage-based billing and provide necessary data for their accounting and finance teams.


Manish shared, “Metronome helped us with a critical transition from legacy enterprise pricing to a flexible consumption-based model. A problem that would have taken us months to solve and build ourselves, Metronome solved in minutes.”

Flexible out-of-the-box solution

Though Cribl considered building a solution in-house, they knew their engineering resources would be better spent on their product rather than building and maintaining a billing system.

“Building billing ourselves would have slowed down our ability to deliver value to our customers and it wouldn't have worked as well. With Metronome, we only have to focus on making sure we have the right data that feeds into Metronome and not the complexities of metering and billing,” said Nick.

Unmatched level of service and partnership

The Cribl team was also looking for a long-term partner that could both advise on their transition to a consumption model and help implement it.

“The proactive help we get from the team is second to none. The depth of information the team has and their openness to listen to customer feedback is commendable,” said Manish.

Developer-friendly platform that serves both technical and business users.

While usage-based billing presents unique technical challenges, ultimately teams across the organization need access to billing data to power internal reporting, close the books, and drive upsell and engagement opportunities.

Nick shared, “A modern billing and metering system needs to service the business user and the developer. Metronome does both. Our developers can easily work with the APIs and backend systems to feed data, pull data out, automate, and connect customer data to Metronome. Our business users work within the Metronome UI to build plans and pull data into our data warehouse, our CRM, and reporting tools—wherever it needs to go.”

1000s of hours saved

As a lean engineering and product team, Cribl is focused on innovating for customers. With Metronome, the team gets a robust billing solution that is flexible and reliable.

“You saved us thousands of development hours that we would have spent building an in-house solution for metering and billing that would have slowed down our time-to-market. Metronome hasn’t just saved us developer time, you’ve saved us business time as well. Metronome makes it easy to manage plans, innovate in pricing, and expose data to the teams who need it,” said Nick.

Pricing changes in minutes, not months

Cribl continues to experiment with pricing and with Metronome, and the team can implement those changes quickly.

Manish shared, “With Metronome’s flexibility, we created a new plan for all our customers on Cribl.Cloud within minutes. It literally took us minutes—not hours, not days, not weeks. The same thing if we had built it from scratch would have taken an extensive engineering approach that would have taken a month.”

Significant headcount savings

A billing source-of-truth requires continuous maintenance on top of architecting new pricing changes or custom contracts being created. With Metronome handling this, Nick shared, “We’ve saved at least 3-4 engineering headcount with Metronome. Billing isn’t our core competency and being able to outsource it to Metronome has been a huge benefit to us.”

Customer-facing billing dashboards

The Metronome API powers all of Cribl’s customer-facing dashboards including their current credit count, their usage, what services they are using credits on, and their monthly invoices.

Business system integrations

Metronome is deeply integrated with Cribl’s tech stack, from seamlessly sending data into Metronome to automatically sending data and reporting to the right teams in the systems they use.

Nick shared, “We’re bringing Metronome data in through Segment and flowing data out into Looker dashboards, Snowflake, and Salesforce. It’s been a huge win working with Metronome and being able to serve the developer side and the business side with our revenue operations and sales teams.”

Customer engagement and adoption

With Metronome serving as the source of truth for customer consumption, the team runs reports and creates alerts to help sales drive upsell conversations and encourage customer adoption. “Metronome helps us track, monitor, and report on customer usage and ensures our go-to-market teams have timely information to focus on areas of opportunity for the business,” said Manish.

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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.