Releasing products with Metronome
Metronome was designed as a customizable toolkit that supports both common and complex billing methods. From usage-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service to seat-based DevTools, you can model your products on Metronome.
For a more seamless Metronome product launch, focus first on the design rather than the integration. While you can, and often will, modify your pricing and packaging down the line, it's best to build your integration on a fully conceived model.
1. Start with the invoice
It's best practice to start from the top—with Metronome, that's the final invoice that we'll send to your customers.
Think about what your ideal invoice looks like. If you have existing invoices for other products, consider what elements you want to keep or what you'd like to change.
2. Design plans and products
Next, think about what components you need to use to create that invoice.
There's a number of decisions to make with regards to pricing design. Here's an initial check list of things to think through:
- How do you want to bundle SKUs on an invoice?
- In Metronome, you'll group SKUs together into products.
- How do you want to price your SKUs?
- For purely usage-based charges, you can consider flat usage, tiered, volume-based or block pricing. Alternatively, you can add fixed recurring or composite charges. In Metronome, plans have tremendous flexibility.
- How often do you want to invoice your customers?
- In Metronome, plans also set the invoice schedule. You can specify billing frequency, as well as if an invoice is charged in advance or in arrears.
- How can customers upgrade or downgrade between different pricing tiers?
- If you have customers with significantly different pricing plans, you might consider making multiple plans in Metronome and converting customers between them when they upgrade or downgrade.
- How do you want to handle promotions and trials?
- You have lots of options here, from trials, credit grants, and more.
Once you've thought through what your ideal billing design looks like, review our docs and play around in the UI to see how that design can be configured in Metronome.
3. Define usage data and billable metrics
With a solid understanding of your pricing and packaging design and how you'll model this in Metronome, you can turn to your usage data and billable metrics. Metronome uses your raw, real-time usage data to aggregate customer usage over a billing period and generate invoices for you automatically.
You can send data to Metronome using our API or from Segment.
4. Implement and test
At this point you can implement your design in Metronome, although it's a best practice to double-check your work to ensure you've covered your use cases accurately and thoroughly.
To model your product in Metronome, use the Metronome app or API to create all of the entities mentioned above. Metronome provides a sandbox for you to build and test a non-production version.
Start the implementation in mostly inverse order:
- Create your billable metrics.
- Start sending usage data.
- Create your products.
- Set up plans.
- Create various test customers on those plans.
Once you've gone through the implementation steps, all that's left to do is test it out. See our testing guide for best practices.
5. Set up invoicing
Using the products and plans you define, and the data you send, Metronome automatically generates accurate invoices for your customers on your billing cycle. To receive payments on these invoices, configure your preferred billing service. Metronome supports AWS Marketplace, Stripe, and more.
Once you have an account with the provider—existing or newly created—use the Metronome app to enable it.
6. Ship!
Once Metronome is fully configured and integrated with your systems, Metronome can generate your prescribed invoices. You're ready to ship your product on Metronome! Simply repeat step 4 in production mode, using the Metronome app or the API.
