Breaking Down the Bottlenecks in Billing
Billing shouldn't slow your business down. Pricing models are evolving, but most billing systems still require engineers to make every change. Changing pricing, provisioning deals, and applying usage limits often means more code, more maintenance, and more complexity.
OpenMeter is changing that with a three-in-one solution for metering, billing, and pricing. The latest updates make it possible to define pricing, manage usage, and collect payments without engineering involvement. Business teams get the flexibility they need, and developers can focus on building products instead of maintaining billing systems.
The Developer Bottleneck in Billing
Billing has long been a developer problem. Traditional systems require engineers to manually implement pricing changes, build integrations, and maintain product catalogs. Hard-coding billing logic creates technical debt, making it difficult to iterate on pricing strategies without breaking existing systems.
Why are we doing this? Have you ever tried implementing pricing and packaging with Stripe? You would think it would be straightforward. Unfortunately, it's not.
Legacy billing solutions only provide basic building blocks but no structured way to implement pricing with entitlements or provision sales deals. As a result, developers must implement packaging from scratch including, feature access and usage limits, requiring significant investment and ongoing maintenance.
Revenue teams need the ability to experiment, iterate, and respond to competitive pressures. But without a flexible solution, companies either struggle with rigid, developer-dependent billing systems or resort to manual workarounds that introduce inefficiencies and errors.
A Three-in-One Solution
We built OpenMeter to remove these pain points and provide the fastest way to implement usage-based billing. Our three-in-one solution consists of:
1. Real-Time Metering and Usage Tracking
- Meter billable events at scale, from LLMs and GPUs to API usage.
- Open-Source SDKs for Node.js, Go, Python, and other languages.
- Live usage feedback enables customers to track consumption and control costs.
- A built-in usage lake stores and analyzes usage data for auditing and revenue optimization.
2. No-Code Product Catalog
- Self-serve pricing and packaging allow business teams to define and change pricing without engineering.
- Flexible entitlements enables to describe feature access and usage limits as part of your pricing and packaging
- Seamless iteration enables quick adjustments to respond to market conditions and customer needs.
- Custom deal provisioning makes it possible to structure enterprise and self-service plans dynamically.
3. Real-Time Billing and Invoicing
- Automated invoices ensure accurate billing based on real-time metering.
- Integration with existing systems allows data to sync with payment providers, accounting platforms, and CRMs.
- Advanced capabilities include progressive billing, credits, and custom billing rules.
Why This Matters Now
The landscape of monetization is evolving rapidly. AI-driven applications, large-scale API consumption, and new pricing paradigms demand flexible, real-time billing solutions. Companies that can adapt their pricing models quickly will have a competitive edge. Those that rely on outdated billing systems will fall behind.
With OpenMeter, businesses gain:
- Speed: Eliminate weeks or months of engineering work when updating pricing or launching new products.
- Agility: Experiment with new pricing strategies without breaking existing systems.
- Accuracy: Maintain a single source of truth for metering, billing, and revenue tracking.
OpenMeter in Action
Consider a SaaS company offering AI-powered tools with usage-based pricing. Traditionally, implementing a new pricing model would require weeks of developer time. With OpenMeter:
- Usage is metered in real time without custom engineering.
- Business teams define pricing directly within the No-Code Product Catalog.
- Invoices are generated automatically, ensuring seamless revenue collection.
OpenMeter integrates with your existing infrastructure, making it easy to push billing data to payment providers, accounting platforms, and CRMs.
What's Next?
Today, we introduced OpenMeter Billing and our new No-Code Product Catalog. But we're not stopping here. Tomorrow, we'll go deeper into how OpenMeter enables self-serve product and deal provisioning, eliminating engineering bottlenecks entirely.
Stay tuned, and in the meantime, explore OpenMeter to see how it can transform your billing process.
