How Metronome works
Metronome's internal components and external integrations work together with your data to build an invoice: how your customers pay for your services. This page describes the components of a Metronome invoice.
Follow the Quickstart to sample Metronome and create your first invoice.
Billable metrics
Billable metrics are fundamental to Metronome's metering model. They represent the various usage components that Metronome meters and aggregates. These metrics appear as line items on an invoice and each has a unique price per unit.
Products
Metronome provides flexibility in invoice presentation by allowing you to create products associated with billable metrics. Products represent charges on an invoice, and are analogous to SKUs or items in an ERP system. You can also create non-metered products, like a fixed recurring platform-access fee per month.
At Metronome, the prices you charge your customers are not baked into the products. This allows you to use the same product as a billing mechanism across all your customers.
Pricing and packaging
Rate cards define default pricing and availability for products.
Contracts are a way to provision customers and configure your billing. A contract defines a customer’s products, pricing schedules, committed spending, and more. This comes from the associated rate card, committed spend agreements, and any additional terms like one-time or recurring charges. Contracts define the invoice frequency and presentation.
You can create more custom billing by packaging up other Metronome functionality, including trials and credits. You can set up tiered pricing and add charges in advance or in arrears.
Customers
Once you've created billable metrics, products, and rate cards, you can create customers and provision them on contracts to kick off the billing process. You can set the customer's start date for the contract, apply any custom discounts, or add a trial.
Once a customer is on an active contract, Metronome starts generating invoices representing the customer's spend.