How Metronome works
Metronome is the leading billing platform for usage-based and subscription pricing models. Metronome couples your raw, real-time data with flexible pricing and packaging capabilities to accurately bill your customers.
For billing, Metronome integrates with the most popular providers: AWS Marketplace and Stripe. Many Metronome clients already use these services, making the transition to Metronome even easier.
Salesforce is another supported integration, allowing you to maintain your current customer management or CPQ flow.
Metronome's internal components and external integrations work together with your data to build an invoice: how your customers pay for your services.
Anatomy of an invoice
The basic workflow to invoice customers through Metronome includes creating billable metrics (metered and aggregated consumption-focused components), named products that represent these metrics on invoices, and plans with assigned pricing and billing logic.
Billable metrics
Billable metrics are fundamental to Metronome's metered model. They represent the various consumption components that Metronome meters and aggregates. These metrics appear as line items and sub-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 groups for billable metrics as products. 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.
Plans and packaging
Plans define a set list of prices for products. Plans also dictate 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 tiers for volume-based pricing and add charges in advance or in arrears.
Customers
Once you've created billable metrics, products, and plans, you can add plans to customers to kick off the billing process. You can set the customer's start date for the plan, specify any price adjustments, and edit the trial requirements. You also have the option to apply a custom discount.
Integrations
Metronome acts as a central hub to tie your business systems together. You can connect your website, products, business systems, and tech stack to Metronome through our out-of-the-box integrations and robust API.
You can use Metronome as the data source for custom billing dashboards or integrate billing with provisioning for self-serve automation. The API makes your billing data accessible and exportable to fit with your existing systems and processes to provide new capabilities and insights.
Real-time source of truth
Metronome acts as the source of truth for your billing and usage data. Through the Metronome API, you can fetch up-to-date usage and spending data to power your dashboards, analytics tools, and notifications. You can query events and send or pull usage data in and out of Metronome.
Data in Metronome is fully auditable and backed by a ledger, ensuring accurate and compliant billing for reliable revenue recognition and detailed transaction reporting. Metronome's billing infrastructure offers scaled data ingestion with idempotency guarantees and data backfilling, ensuring invoice accuracy and providing real-time visibility into customer usage.
