When Luminai was preparing to make the move from seat-based pricing to a more custom, usage-based pricing model that would better serve their midmarket and enterprise customers, they knew they needed a comprehensive, trustworthy billing solution that goes beyond supporting simple pay-as-you-go (PAYG) plans. 

We spoke with Ashwin Mudaliar, Operations lead at Luminai, to learn about their transition to usage-based pricing and to get his take on how startups can scale successfully by planning for the next 2–3 years and setting up the right systems and tools to enable incredible growth.

Key outcomes from the partnership include:

• Smooth transition from seat-based pricing to usage-based pricing for enterprise customers
• Faster time to revenue by moving customers from quarterly to monthly billing
• Reduced time required to set up new customer contracts—from 2 hours per customer to <5 minutes
• Reduced time for month-end book closing—from 2–3 hours per customer to <3 hours total

Transitioning to usage-based pricing for enterprise customers

Luminai started out with a fairly common pricing structure: the seat-based model. As the company grew, they realized the mismatch between their value of automating mission-critical workflows for customers and their uniformly low seat pricing. Since each workflow for each customer is unique, they needed to be priced differently based on the criticality and complexity of the automated tasks. As they quickly acquired more midmarket and large enterprise customers, it became clear that Luminai needed to make a major shift in their commercial structure. It was time to enable a flexible, usage-based billing model that accounted for the variable value Luminai offers their customers.

“Even if you're a small company, if you are planning to serve these larger organizations, you are in the big leagues. You want to be able to put your best foot forward on some of these core infrastructure pieces. That's not an area you can cut corners in when you're building a company.”

Managing fast growth and increasing contract complexity

Ashwin knew that operations had to be forward-thinking as the company’s growth accelerated. As Luminai looked at transitioning to a pricing model based on usage and value, the complexity and risk of backend system slowdowns only grew. One critical aspect Luminai knew they had to get right was the solution that would accurately and reliably enable the complex, flexible contracts their enterprise customers needed, at speed. 

“Especially when you have a sophisticated product, you need to be future-proofing yourself and ensuring accuracy. If something gets messed up on an invoice, your enterprise customers will immediately lose trust.”

Powerful and flexible pricing model 

The switch to a value-based, usage-based pricing model was critical to Luminai’s growth strategy, and the complexity that comes with such a shift—especially at scale—isn’t something to underestimate. Luminai’s pricing takes into account a unit price for each automated workflow, the number of times each workflow runs successfully, and the value each specific workflow brings to the customer, making each customer’s pricing and contract terms highly unique. Trusting that their billing system won’t be the blocker to signing new clients is a relief for the team.

"Some other offerings had shiny bells and whistles like built-in billing analytics, but I could have an engineer build that in a day if needed. The hard part is the flexible pricing model that supports our bespoke contract terms. After evaluating Metronome vs. competitors, it was clear that Metronome did this right.”

Trusted source of truth

With the complexity that the shift to usage-based billing introduced to each customer contract, the Luminai team knew that being able to provide accurate billing data to confidently manage any billing disputes was critical. “Any mistake starts to degrade confidence,” said Ashwin. When one of their largest customers had a dispute about a charge, the Luminai team was able to use Metronome’s data to quickly allay the customer’s questions, instilling even more trust into the relationship. 

“I have no qualms going into those conversations, and that's thanks to the data I received from Metronome.”

Future-proofing growth with a scalable billing platform 

As a seasoned business operations leader, Ashwin knows that operations can’t be short-sighted, especially when a startup is expecting fast growth. Luminai’s customer base is rapidly shifting to midmarket and enterprise, with the average ACV increasing by 10–15 times over the past few years. They need to be able to quickly adapt to customers with more complex needs and requirements. Anchoring usage-based pricing on the tangible ROI that Luminai provides is crucial, and their billing system must support customized pricing that’s aligned with each workflow’s value. With Metronome, Luminai also introduced several prepaid models, in addition to a purely consumption-based model, to better serve their enterprise customers.

“Don't think about just today, tomorrow, and six months from now. Think about next year, three years from now. And if your expectation is to be growing and scaling, think about a sophisticated enough product that can help you do that. Something that’s a nice-to-have today might become a must-have very soon.”

In just over a month, Luminai’s customer migration was complete, and they were up and running with Metronome. Ashwin says that without Metronome, “we wouldn't be able to grow as quickly as we have in terms of being able to set up our customers and serve them the way that we want to with this complexity of our products.”

Hours of manual work saved

Before working with Metronome, the Luminai team spent 3 hours per customer consolidating, reconciling, and validating customer invoices every billing cycle. Now, by connecting Metronome with existing tools like QuickBooks and Bill.com, all that work across their customers is done in less than half a day, and they expect that time to decrease dramatically in subsequent months.

Similarly, setting up new commercial terms for new customers went from 2 hours to a handful of minutes, saving the team countless hours now and into the future as their customer growth continues to accelerate.

“We've really leveled this up. It's night and day—my CEO comes and tells me this during our one-on-ones. It's just night and day in terms of our capabilities and what we are able to do.”

Faster time to revenue

With the power and flexibility of Metronome, Luminai has been able to transition customer billing from a quarterly cycle to monthly, increasing the speed of realized revenue by 2 months per customer.

“We have started shifting customers from quarterly to monthly billing, and we wouldn't be able to do that without Metronome,” said Ashwin.