How DataStax uses Metronome to transform cloud billing and unlock FinOps efficiency

May 16, 2025

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0 Min Read

Stephanie Keep

Content Marketing

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The shift from on-premise infrastructure to cloud-based services has become a dominant industry trend for companies in the Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space. With this transition comes the complexity of moving from a traditional fixed license to a cloud-first, usage-based billing model. This shift requires new billing mechanisms, real-time infrastructure, and better financial oversight, leading to significant operational challenges.

DataStax began exploring usage-based pricing with their cloud offerings around 2016. For them, the transition to a cloud-first approach required balancing two key customer segments:

Self-serve developers: A high-volume segment representing individual developers and teams, where many users utilize the free and PAYGO tiers
Enterprise customers: The primary revenue drivers, contributing over 90% of cloud revenue due to large contracts and higher operational reliance

The challenge: The in-house billing bottleneck

Like many companies new to usage-based billing, DataStax initially relied on Stripe combined with custom-built logic to fill functionality gaps. This patchwork approach allowed them to launch quickly but introduced significant operational limitations:

1,200+ SKUs: Managing a sprawling catalog of pricing across products, regions, and cloud providers became unwieldy and hard to maintain.
Credit tracking challenges: Enterprise customers often used discounted, prepaid credits that burned down over time. However, Stripe couldn’t support account hierarchies, forcing the team to build brittle workarounds just to track credit usage across multiple users under a single enterprise account.
No customer visibility: Customers had no visibility to usage or spend data mid-cycle. Sales and CS teams had to file tickets, and engineers had to run scripts just to answer basic questions.
Painful pricing changes: Applying product-specific discounts or rolling out new tiered pricing meant editing hard-coded logic—often impacting the unintended customers. Pricing iteration was slow, error-prone, and high-risk.

While the team built sophisticated workarounds, they came at a cost. Tracking when pricing changes happened and which accounts they affected required manually searching through old code releases—unsustainable for audits. When they explored staggered price overrides (like delaying a change for a contract under a price lock), it became clear: their current system just wasn’t built for it. It wasn’t just hard—it was impossible.

As DataStax's customer base grew, their back office teams reached a breaking point:

Meeting compliance and audit requirements became overwhelming
Manual reconciliation wasted time and introduced errors
Billing inconsistencies significantly delayed revenue recognition

Why Metronome? A data model built for enterprise reality

Adrian Sandham, Head of Enterprise Systems and Automation at DataStax, led the search for a better billing solution. With a career spanning enterprise systems, finance operations, and automation at companies like DataStax, Accenture, Dell Technologies, Adrian brought a deep understanding of what billing systems need to serve both finance and ops teams.

Metronome stood out for its foundational data model—specifically its contract structure, which closely mirrored how enterprise commercial models are structured and executed. This model enabled:

A programmatic representation of contracts that flows cleanly across CRM, ERP, billing, and other finance systems
A reliable audit trail for compliance and financial oversight
A scalable foundation for future pricing changes without added complexity

Before and after: How Metronome transformed DataStax's FinOps operations

Customer lifecycle management

With a usage-based pricing model, Datastax needs to manage customers from contract creation to add-ons to renewal, ensuring clear tracking of usage metrics, accurate billing based on various commit models, and proactive customer engagement to drive consumption and expansion revenue. It is critical to track customer data consistently across the end-to-end quote-to-cash system.

Before	After
🚩No built-in account hierarchy, requiring custom logic to map multiple Stripe accounts with a single paying customer contract. 🚩Complex workarounds needed to track and calculate prepaid credit usage across multiple Stripe accounts. 🚩Manual reconciliation between systems introduced errors.	✅ Contracts structured in Metronome now align directly with enterprise agreements that both product and backend systems can reference without translation. ✅ Multi-year pricing terms can be modeled without engineering effort. ✅ Complete customer lifecycle tracking from a single, unified dataset.

Before

After

🚩No built-in account hierarchy, requiring custom logic to map multiple Stripe accounts with a single paying customer contract.

🚩Complex workarounds needed to track and calculate prepaid credit usage across multiple Stripe accounts.

🚩Manual reconciliation between systems introduced errors.

✅ Contracts structured in Metronome now align directly with enterprise agreements that both product and backend systems can reference without translation.

✅ Multi-year pricing terms can be modeled without engineering effort.

✅ Complete customer lifecycle tracking from a single, unified dataset.

‍Audit and compliance

Auditing usage-based revenue requires validating dynamic consumption data, tracing the precise unit rate applied to customer usage at any given moment, mapping usage to billed amounts, and tracking commit burndown accurately.

Adrian recognized that strong audit trails aren't optional extras—they're fundamental pillars supporting enterprise relationships. Robust auditing capabilities serve dual purposes: meeting stringent compliance requirements while building the credibility that sustains long-term partnerships.

Before	After
🚩Auditing required tracing back code deployment logs to determine when pricing changes were made. 🚩Difficult to track adjustments across multiple billing system versions, making reconciliation difficult.	✅ Full audit logs are directly available in Metronome. ✅ Compliance teams can self-serve financial records without engineering effort. ✅ Each contract can easily be linked via metadata to each prepaid commit for detailed, easy-to-follow tracking.

Before

After

🚩Auditing required tracing back code deployment logs to determine when pricing changes were made.

🚩Difficult to track adjustments across multiple billing system versions, making reconciliation difficult.

✅ Full audit logs are directly available in Metronome.

✅ Compliance teams can self-serve financial records without engineering effort.

✅ Each contract can easily be linked via metadata to each prepaid commit for detailed, easy-to-follow tracking.

‍Pricing iteration

DataStax's cloud product Astra has been gaining strong customer traction since launch. Being able to iterate pricing strategies as products evolve and offer special pricing for certain products was highly desired. However, their existing billing system made even simple pricing updates difficult, turning pricing changes into an extremely expensive exercise.

Before	After
🚩Even simple pricing adjustments required engineering to make hard-coded changes. 🚩Finance had to offer credits or rebates as a workaround for pricing updates. 🚩Immense coordination was required across 50+ cross-functional team members to implement workarounds and communicate with customers.	✅ Pricing changes are fully automated within Metronome. A recent major pricing update only required three days from start to finish. ✅ No manual interventions needed, significantly reducing coordination overhead. ✅ Easily configure any special discount to optimize pricing strategies.

Before

After

🚩Even simple pricing adjustments required engineering to make hard-coded changes.

🚩Finance had to offer credits or rebates as a workaround for pricing updates.

🚩Immense coordination was required across 50+ cross-functional team members to implement workarounds and communicate with customers.

✅ Pricing changes are fully automated within Metronome. A recent major pricing update only required three days from start to finish.

✅ No manual interventions needed, significantly reducing coordination overhead.

✅ Easily configure any special discount to optimize pricing strategies.

‍Customer spend tracking

DataStax's commitment to putting customers first runs deep in their company DNA. While they've always recognized that transparent billing is essential for building trust in usage-based pricing models, their engineering teams were caught in a familiar dilemma—balancing infrastructure improvements against the pressure to ship new product features. Implementing Metronome has finally enabled them to deliver this important capability without compromising innovation.

Before	After
🚩Customers lacked real-time visibility into their usage and spend. 🚩Customer success team needed to file tickets to access customer's consumption data. 🚩Engineering had to manually extract and compile usage reports for each customer request.	✅ Self-serve dashboards provide customers with real-time usage and spend data. ✅ Customer success and finance teams can access billing data without engineering involvement.

Before

After

🚩Customers lacked real-time visibility into their usage and spend.

🚩Customer success team needed to file tickets to access customer's consumption data.

🚩Engineering had to manually extract and compile usage reports for each customer request.

✅ Self-serve dashboards provide customers with real-time usage and spend data.

✅ Customer success and finance teams can access billing data without engineering involvement.

Financial close process

DataStax's commitment to financial accuracy required painstaking monthly reconciliations that consumed extensive resources, with teams spending days manually reviewing contracts and verifying invoices. This labor-intensive process became unsustainable as their customer base grew, ultimately becoming the breaking point that drove their decision to adopt Metronome as a more scalable solution.

Before	After
🚩Monthly book close required 2 people and 5+ days of demanding work to finalize. 🚩Manual review and reconciliation required for each contract. 🚩Significant effort spent on manual invoice verification.	✅ Book close is now automated and takes 2–3 hours. ✅ Built confidence in financial reporting through system accuracy. ✅ Invoice finalization process reduced to just minutes.

Before

After

🚩Monthly book close required 2 people and 5+ days of demanding work to finalize.

🚩Manual review and reconciliation required for each contract.

🚩Significant effort spent on manual invoice verification.

✅ Book close is now automated and takes 2–3 hours.

✅ Built confidence in financial reporting through system accuracy.

✅ Invoice finalization process reduced to just minutes.

Common pitfalls in building in-house billing

Having navigated DataStax's billing evolution firsthand, Adrian learned that developers often underestimate billing's complexity, assuming it can be improved incrementally over time. What seemed like logical early design decisions became expensive bottlenecks as the company grew. For companies considering in-house billing systems, Adrian recommends watching for these common pitfalls:

Hardcoding pricing logic, making future adjustments difficult (if not impossible)
Lack of a middle layer for flexible pricing adjustments that decouples pricing logic from data logic
Underestimating compliance and auditability requirements
Failing to plan for account hierarchies and multi-entity tracking for enterprise customers

Metronome’s impact on Datastax’s FinOps team

Metronome transformed how DataStax’s FinOps team operates. Before Metronome, manual processes, heavy engineering dependencies, and limited data access created bottlenecks for the finance team. Now, the team moves faster, works more independently, and handles complexity with ease. The impact shows up not just in speed, but in how confidently the team manages and scales their operations. By transitioning to Metronome, DataStax has:

Reduced monthly book close time from 5+ days to just 2-3 hours
Decreased pricing update implementation from weeks to just 3 days, eliminating involvement from 50+ team members
Enabled self-service access to usage data, eliminating engineering tickets for basic information
Streamlined revenue recognition with automatic contract-to-usage connections

These efficiencies have allowed DataStax to focus on product innovation rather than billing infrastructure limitations. Their improved billing system now provides a scalable foundation that adapts to evolving pricing models and growing customer needs.