Simplify Stripe Metered Billing with Togai's Metering.ai: A No-Code Metering Solution for SaaS Billing

If you are a B2B SaaS company facing challenges in converting your usage data into an invoice on different billing platforms including Stripe, Zuora, Chargebee or Recurly, Metering.ai is meant for you. We understand that maintaining 100s of Excel or Google sheets is not what you want to be doing. We also know that you do not want to be spending your valuable time doing manual work converting this raw data into a format that is accepted by your billing system. If you spend tens of hours every month manually aggregating and transforming your usage data into metered values that your billing system requires, Metering.ai will remove that work completely from your plate.

Let me paint a picture for you - You are a product manager, a finance executive or a customer success manager at an early stage fast growing B2B SaaS company called Flack. You joined Flack hoping to learn and grow from doing a 0 → 1 journey. You are bristling with creative ideas and cannot wait to execute them. Life is good!

You have solved a core need for your users and can see the initial signs of product-market fit. Customers are pulling your product and it is just flying off the shelves. Wow amazing, right? If only, it was this easy 😣You launch a new feature that most customers ask and suddenly your engagement metrics fall drastically. That must have been a rude shock? How come a feature that majority of your users asked for leads to drop-offs? You then realize you missed instrumenting that feature and are unable to track the metrics and funnel for that feature anf a few others launched before too. (As they say, you need data only when things break 🙂)

You painstakingly instrument every little thing in your product and start collecting all sorts of metrics. Now, you identify the issue with that feature and realize it was a simple validation issue with one form. You go ahead and fix it and everything is rosy once again? Well, you start to get the picture now.

Next, you decide to start your monetization and get customers to pay. You do all the work and understand the willingness to pay and come up with a beautiful 3x3 matrix of customer segments with their corresponding pricing and packaging design with a hybrid pricing model that relies on actual usage, because that is the value metric your customers see. Only thing left - set it up on Stripe and start seeing the cash tap flow.

Till now, you have been working on game-changing and high impact ideas that have moved the needle for your business and customers. You took care of strategy and execution and can see your 5 year path with the startup ahead and cannot wait to get to the next level. Then at the end of the 1st month after you start monetization, you face the music - early stage fast growing startups are pure chaos. You pre-empted it but not to the extent that you see there. And the faster the startup grows, more does the chaos.

What does this mean for you? While the price plans were setup on Stripe, you did not think what would happen when payments had to be collected? So, you end up manually pulling the usage data from all metering system or analytics tool and collate it in an Excel. Then, you export all the price plan, product and package information from Stripe. Then you do some magic and automate everything without worrying about accuracy of your invoices. (oh sorry, we skipped to the part where you use metering.ai to do the magic).

In reality, you end up spending 20+ hours of Vlookups, Pivot Tables, Row and Column transformations on Excel/Google Sheets and then painstakingly update all this information on your Stripe account. 20+ hours that you could be spending on actual strategic things that move the needle for your business and you spend it on operating important, but unnecessary grunt work that makes you sigh - ‘It’s 2023, we have ChatGPT and general AI, but not a tool that converts my raw usage data into metered usage and push it automatically into my billing system’.

Well, metering.ai is that tool and as a builder, having faced this exact same problem myself, I cannot wait for everyone who faced this problem to use it. And the best part - it is completely free. What we are asking for is 15 minutes of your time and understand how we can solve it for you. Please feel free to write to aravind@togai.com or reach out to us via our Chat support, or if you prefer having a chat - you can book a time on my calendar here. Happy metering!!!

Metering.ai is a complete no-code tool to convert your raw usage data into metered aggregated values and push them into Stripe for invoicing. We had mentioned in detail the problems with Stripe metered billing here and why we built it here. In this blog, we explain how you can implement 5 common usage based pricing models using metering.ai
1. Count of API hits for a communications API company
If you are a API first company (eg: Twilio) and are pricing your platform based on the number of API hits - say 0.5$ per API request, you can simply upload your API usage log file into metering.ai and add the formula = count (API_request_id) , if your request_id is numeric value format = counta (API_request_id) , if your request_id is string value format
2. Percentage of total payment value for a fintech payments company

If you are a fintech company processing payments and charge your customers a commission based on a percentage of the total payment value processed, similar to Stripe, you can upload your customer wise payment value data and configure metering.ai as:

= sum(total_payment_value) * commission_percentage_value

This will directly give the output as the total commission revenue for your business.

3. Marketing automation product / customer data platform that charges based on monthly active users

We support any type of transformation and aggregation that Excel supports off the bat. In this case, if you are looking to meter the number of monthly active users for each of your customers and price based on that, you can simply use the below formula in metering.ai:

= countunique(user_id)

If you note here, we pull all your product and pricing details as is from Stripe without you having to manually configure anything on metering.ai. In the 1st two examples, we showed a standard pay-as-you-go pricing model which is charged on a per API hit or % of payment value processed.

However, in this example, we show a graduated pricing model (platform fee upto a certain usage limit and overages beyond that) being used in Stripe, and metering.ai handles it seamlessly.

4. Cloud infrastructure company that prices based on compute hour

For a cloud infrastructure company that has a pricing based on the total hours for which an instance was running during the month, there needs to be some instrumentation done to meter and send usage pulses periodically to a metering system. While you can use Togai for this and do the aggregation on top, metering.ai can also be used standalone to input your raw usage pulse events and apply your price transformations on the usage data and push them to Stripe for invoicing your customers and collecting payments.

In this example, we have a file where the usage data is collected every hour as microhour units but as a negative value due to some instrumentation issue. The pricing for this product is counted as the total number of credits that are metered multiplied by the price per credit, which is 3.2$ and maintained in Stripe.

The formula in metering.ai will be:

= abs(sum(ComputeMicroHour)*0.0036/3600))

5. Applying conditions and filters via metering.ai

In this example, we will explain how you can also configure metering.ai and apply different filter conditions to generate your invoices accurately on Stripe with absolutely zero code.

Here, we have 2 pricing models on Stripe - one for a customer on a basic plan and another is a premium plan with additional features and capabilities. The pricing is metered in both plans but the price per unit configured in Stripe varies.

The usage file consists of a column which has a flag (YES/NO) that says whether the customer is on a Premium plan or not. As you can see, by connecting to Stripe, both the plan details are pulled automatically.

Now we configure the formula with the filter condition as follows:

Basic plan customer: =sumif(Premium User,"=NO",Total usage in seconds)

Premium plan customer: =sumif(Premium User,"=YES",Total usage)

Here, you can additionally note that the usage fields used for both plans are different - this is another feature supported by metering.ai and you can have any number of usage and filter fields in your raw usage file and use them to apply your conditions.

Once the filters are applied, you can preview the output and then push the data to Stripe automatically for invoicing.

Metering.ai is an add-on product to your billing system - be it Stripe/Zuora/Chargebee/Recurly or even Togai, we help you meter any type of raw usage data with zero engineering effort and no code. Using Metering.ai you can now forget about inaccurate invoicing and long manual hours spent billing your customers. This tool helps you model any type of pricing use case in just 3 clicks, and best of all - it is completely free !!!

If you have any questions, please feel free to write to aravind@togai.com or reach out to us via our Chat support.

Metering.ai is a no-code (and when we mean no-code, its absolutely zero code) tool to help you convert your usage data into Stripe invoices without having to maintain multiple Google sheets and Excel spreadsheets. You can read more about the tool in our previous blog post here. So, why did we build this tool? The world of SaaS monetization is changing. More companies are trying out modern pricing models that are based on consumption (usage and not users). Based on the report by Open View partners, the number of companies that are implementing complex models with hybrid pricing strategies has grown from 46% in 2022 to 61% in 2023. With the rise of PLG, pricing forms part of the core product strategy and companies that are pricing & building for the end user are winning. As pricing becomes more complex, we are seeing the rise of the modern pricing tech stack as seen in the State of Usage Based pricing report. Togai is well positioned as a unique player in the metering, pricing and billing stack to help companies implement any pricing model as they see fit in minutes and not months. We went down the rabbit hole of understanding the customer needs from first principles. After speaking with 100s of SaaS companies and founders, we realized the major considerations for product, finance and customer success teams to implement a new pricing model based on usage and generate accurate invoices for their customers:

Manual effort of atleast 20 hours every month to generate invoices
Automating it requires engineering bandwidth which is extremely hard to get
Time taken to launch a pricing strategy is extremely high (>3 months)
Maintain complex excel spreadsheets and Google sheets to manage your pricing in an unsecure manner
Unable to trigger workflows or set alerts based on rules (eg: change price plan when a customer crosses a usage threshold)
We realized the need for a tool that could solve for the above for a product/finance/customer success team without the need to involve other stakeholders. This was a pain they faced but more often than not, the solution required external help. This is why we decided to build a solution that solved the need of the end user and not the external stakeholder.

Metering.ai is built on the same foundation as Togai and provides the scalability and flexibility to

Convert raw usage data in format into Stripe invoices
Apply any type of computation and transformation (we support everything that Excel does)
Automatically push this information to Stripe
With absolutely NO code or engineering effort.
We decided to launch Metering.ai as a Free tool and help companies not have to worry about the bottlenecks of their billing system to change/implement their pricing model. In fact, Metering.ai does not even send your information to our servers and you do not have to worry about your data privacy in any way.

The only request I have is for people to share feedback through our Live chat or have a quick chat by booking some time here

Happy pricing and invoicing 😀 !!!