Usage-based pricing is reshaping how SaaS companies monetize and is redefining how product teams build, organize, and scale. In a recent episode of Unpack Pricing, Metronome’s CPO James Brown spoke with Brandon Walsh, Director of Product Management for Fintech and Billing at HubSpot, about how usage models are shifting product strategy from the ground up.

The message is clear: billing is no longer back office—it’s product.

And product leaders who treat pricing as a dynamic, user-facing experience will lead the next wave of SaaS growth.

Billing is now product—design it like one

When it comes to usage-based pricing, billing is no longer a separate system bolted onto the product—it is the product. Billing experiences must be designed with the same rigor as onboarding flows or in-app dashboards.

Brandon shared a framework every product org should adopt: billing must be transparent, predictable, auditable, and fair.

One example Brandon shared was that it wasn’t unheard of at Intercom for a triggered outbound email campaign to send 50,000 emails in one week—well beyond the customer’s expectation, and creating a major, unanticipated billing spike for that customer. When you charge by messages sent, the result isn’t unexpected: frustration, support tickets, and potential churn. These moments underscore that billing UX must include things like usage alerts, cost previews, and permissions-based guardrails.

For modern product teams, this isn’t optional and ties directly to a broader shift we’ve explored in other conversations: just as AWS provides real-time dashboards, budget controls, and usage forecasting, every SaaS product moving toward usage-based billing must do the same.

Action item: First, audit your product for billing visibility. Can users easily see how their actions translate into charges? Then, start small: implement an in-app notification or a usage preview modal tied to a high-impact workflow.

Every team is a customer success team

In traditional seat-based pricing, customer success sits downstream, focusing on renewals, expansion, and relationship management. Revenue in a usage-based model depends on continuous value realization, making every product interaction part of the commercial journey.

That changes the posture of product teams, who can no longer afford to stay at arm’s length from end users.

Usage-based monetization forces tighter feedback loops. Every user touchpoint becomes a potential billing event, which means PMs must understand—and actively manage—the impact of their work on customer outcomes.

This aligns with a broader pattern we’ve been exploring: modern monetization is a product competency. Building features is no longer enough. Product teams must deliver, track, and optimize for monetized outcomes. That’s especially true in an AI world, where consumption can vary widely and unpredictably.

Action item: Set up a biweekly touchpoint between your product and CS teams. Review one active customer account together to understand how product usage aligns (or misaligns) with billing. Identify friction points and opportunities for in-product improvements.

Product managers need cross-functional fluency

As monetization shifts from fixed subscriptions to variable usage, product teams must become fluent in sales, finance, and customer operations. Pricing strategy is no longer the sole domain of the business team—it’s a first-class product concern.

This means that product managers must not only understand what they’re building, but also how it will be sold, who it will impact internally, and what financial implications it carries. Brandon explained how PMs working on monetized features have to factor in sales incentives, forecastability, and even how their changes affected sales quotas and finance reporting. That level of commercial context shaped better product decisions, and surfaced risks earlier.. This fluency is now so essential that Brandon sees the PM talent pipeline changing:

From our own experiences with customers, we’ve seen this play out repeatedly: the best monetization teams embed product leaders who understand revenue mechanics, discounting logic, and customer LTV. This isn’t a stretch—it’s now a requirement.

Action item: Book a 30-minute 1:1 with someone from your finance or sales team. Ask them how your product’s pricing impacts their work—whether it’s forecasting, commissions, or contract complexity. Use their answers to inform your next roadmap decision.

You’re only as fast as your billing system

Speed matters—but pricing complexity can slow teams down fast. As companies evolve from seat-based models to usage or hybrid pricing, the billing system often becomes a bottleneck.

Brandon shared how Intercom leaned into a “run less software” principle, choosing to buy rather than build their billing infrastructure. His take: that managing billing complexity isn’t accretive to your core business, so it makes sense to outsource it.

He noted how experimentation with new pricing often leads to iteration debt—cohorts of customers on outdated plans that are hard to migrate over or grandfather in. Without a flexible data model, these changes become costly and chaotic.

Our team is no stranger to this chaos and has helped customers streamline their billing with a centralized rate card model. James highlighted how Metronome built the rate card system to make those kinds of bulk changes easier. “When you have to make a change, you're just changing that rate card, and that immediately propagates throughout that customer cohort.”

This connects to a recurring theme: billing is product infrastructure. If your monetization agility is constrained by your backend, you're not just slowing down GTM—you’re limiting your ability to grow.

Action item: Ask your engineering or ops lead: How long would it take us to launch a new pricing model for 10% of our customer base? If the answer is weeks or months, it’s time to reevaluate your billing infrastructure.

In sum: Be bold, and be fast

Usage-based pricing isn’t just a trend—it’s an opportunity to fundamentally redesign how product, finance, and customer teams work together. But seizing that opportunity requires courage, agility, and the right foundations.

For product leaders, the mandate is clear: treat billing like product, bring customer outcomes to the center, and lead with commercial fluency. The next generation of SaaS success will be built on these principles.

🎧 Listen to Brandon and James’s full discussion on Episode 8 of Unpack Pricing.

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