Your source for best practices, insights, and tips for usage-based business models.
As we enter the next phase of innovation with Metronome 2.0, we’re thrilled to roll out the latest features that are designed to make pricing and billing simpler, faster, and more flexible. From a revamped pricing data model to enhanced commit contract functionality, our platform now gives you more control than ever to fine-tune your pricing strategy and scale effortlessly. Whether you’re looking to manage rate cards from a single source of truth, customize pricing down to the granular level, or automate workflows to streamline customer billing, Metronome 2.0 has you covered.
While there are hundreds of features included in Metronome 2.0, this changelog highlights key investments we've made to the platform:
Curious to learn more about these features? Join us for our live webinar on November 20th at 10am PST.
A lot has been cooking at Metronome the past few months, and we’re excited to share a taste of what we have been working on! This changelog includes the ability to void invoices via the API, new alerts functionality, credit grant improvements, and more.
Void invoice API
Programmatically void a finalized invoice via the API. This functionality is useful if you have mis-billed a customer or need to adjust and re-generate an invoice that has already been finalized. See API docs here.
SDKs
We have published beta versions of SDKs in Go, Python, and TypeScript to provide a smoother developer experience for the Metronome APIs.
Usage threshold reached alerts are now evaluated in real-time
This alert type sets a threshold for a specific billable metric and labels a customer as 'in_alarm' if the customer's usage for their current billing period (or previous billing period if events are received during the grace period) reaches or goes above your set threshold. This alert type is now measured throughout the day, so you will be alerted as soon as a billable metric passes the threshold. See docs here.
Invoice total reached alert
This alert type sets a threshold for an invoice total and sends a notification if any of the customer's active invoices reaches or exceeds the configured threshold. Note that the invoice total used is the net total after any credits or other adjustments have been applied. This alert can also be configured to filter specific invoice types - for example, it can be set to only alert on usage invoices. See docs here.
Automatic mid-month seat purchase invoices
We've expanded our seat-based billing functionality. Now, when end-customers add new seats mid-period, you can opt-in to have prorated seat purchase invoices generate automatically. Every hour, Metronome assesses the latest seat usage for each customer with an active seat plan and compares it to the number of seats already billed for the period. If the current usage is higher, Metronome automatically generates a prorated seat purchase invoice. See docs here. If you are interested in turning on this functionality, reach out to your Metronome representative.
Cross-invoice tiering
Usage can now be tiered beyond the invoicing period. Clients can configure how often the tier count should reset, providing the flexibility to tier usage over multiple billing periods.This update allows you to set a new 'tier_reset_frequency' value when modeling a usage-based tiered charge on a plan. If set to 0, the tier count does not reset for the duration of the customer plan. If set to any any positive integer value X, the tier count will reset every X billing period. See docs here.
Credit grant rollovers
Configure rollovers on new or existing credit grants. If the credit grant expires, all or a portion of the remaining credit grant balance will roll over into a new credit grant. See API docs here. If you are interested in this functionality, reach out to your Metronome representative.
Backdate credit grants
Credit grants can now be backdated in the UI. This functionality is useful when, for example, you may have mis-billed in a prior month or need to give a customer a credit applicable to a previous month's bill. Using this functionality, you can create a credit grant backdated to that prior month and then void and regenerate that month’s invoice, allowing the invoice to draw down from that new backdated credit. If you are interested in this functionality, reach out to your Metronome representative.
Alert status visible on the customer’s alerts page
The state of an alert ('evaluating', 'ok', or 'in_alarm') can be viewed on the customer’s alerts page in the UI.
New 'customer_plan' table in data export
This table includes individual customers' plan information, including fields like 'created_at', 'starting_on', 'ending_before', and 'custom_fields' which facilitates downstream reconciliation and analysis workflows. See docs here.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Metronome representative.
It’s heating up as we head into Summer and so is our changelog! We’re excited to share all the engineering investments over the past few months, including the creation and management of billable metrics over API, more configuration flexibility with Alerts, new credit grant functionality, and more.
Create and manage billable metrics over API
Programmatically create, archive, and get billable metrics through the API. This is a longstanding customer request and we’re excited to support the automated creation of billable metrics. Previously, billable metric creation was done solely through the UI. See docs here.
Define how alerts should be evaluated using the API and UI
The ‘Create alerts’ endpoint can be configured to evaluate immediately for all customers who meet the alert threshold or evaluate only for future updates on customers who meet the alert threshold.
The default behavior is to evaluate on all customers, but in certain instances, for example creating alerts on an existing set of customers, the preferred behavior may be to only evaluate this alert for future updates (e.g. new usage, customer updates, plan updates, etc.). See API docs here.
Force re-evaluation of alerts for a customer
While alerts are continuously evaluated, Metronome only triggers notifications when an alert changes state. This could lead to unintended behavior if your systems reset their state in response to changes in a customer's plan and an alert re-notification is expected. You can force a re-evaluation of the alert for a specific customer using the ‘Customer alerts reset’ endpoint. See Alerts docs here and API docs here.
Set free trials when adding a customer to a plan through the API
‘Add a plan to a customer’ endpoint now supports setting free trials. Programmatically set and edit free trials for customers through the API. See docs here.
Prevent writing duplicate credit grants
‘Create credit grant’ endpoint now has a ‘uniqueness_key’ on the request body to ensure idempotency and that there is no creation of duplicate credit grants for a customer. See docs here.
Create credit grant and add custom fields in a unified API
Add custom fields to credit grants using the ‘Create credit grant’ endpoint. These custom fields can be used to map to downstream integrations like Stripe. See docs here.
Set an idempotent billing configuration for AWS Marketplace
The ‘Set billing config’ endpoint for the AWS Marketplace integration is now more ergonomic by treating identical configurations set on the same Metronome customer as idempotent. This ensures that a second identical request isn’t treated as a duplicate configuration error.
Audit log enhancements
Interact with the Metronome API using our public Workato connector
Customers using Workato can now interact with the Metronome API without writing custom HTTP calls. This also makes it easier for non-technical users to pull data from an API response through the Workato UI. See docs here.
Map credit grant custom fields to Stripe invoice line item metadata
In the Edit Stripe mappings UI, map credit grant metadata to the Stripe invoice line item metadata. One example use case is for revenue recognition–using Metronome custom fields to pass through NetSuite metadata into the Stripe credit purchase invoice.
Data Export UI
Audit logs UI
Audit logs are now available in the Metronome UI. Easily view actions taken by users and export audit log data.
RBAC error page
When a user is mistakenly assigned multiple RBAC roles, an error page will show the roles misconfigured to the same user, so you can quickly resolve errors.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Metronome representative.
We’re moving full speed ahead in 2024–we announced our Series B, launched our Azure Marketplace integration, and have more exciting updates on the way! We are committed to continuing to deliver an exceptional billing experience to our customers and their customers. This edition of our changelog includes new credit grant and alerting functionality, adding custom fields to invoices, as well as API, webhook, and documentation improvements.
When creating a credit grant, you can now designate a credit grant type (e.g. SLA credits, trial credits). Once a credit grant type is created, alerts can be created for specific credit grant types. For example, you could set an alert when 80% of trial credits are used and use this alert to trigger an in-product notification or customer email. Previously, alerting could not be set on specific credit grant types–you now have more flexibility in alert configuration to power internal and external workflows.
Invoices often need to include customer-specific information, such as a PO number. We now support mapping customer information to a customer invoice using our custom fields functionality.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Metronome representative.
With the end of the year upon us, it’s been a time of reflection of what we’ve achieved as a team and looking ahead to 2024. We’re grateful for the trust and partnership of our customers, the opportunity to innovate alongside them, and continue our mission of helping our customers accelerate their revenue.
This edition of our changelog includes expanded Data Export features, advanced credit grant functionality, as well as API, webook, and UI improvements.
Data Export is a critical part of powering internal workflows that require up-to-date visibility and access to usage, pricing, and revenue data. We continue to invest in making your data fresher and more accessible and have shipped multiple features and improvements:
We’ve expanded embeddable dashboards to include issued credit grants. Easily show available credits, total consumed, total expired, and amount issued to your customers for better spend transparency. See docs here.
We continue to release improvements to our advanced credit grant functionality. We’re excited to share we’ve increased the accuracy of how credit grants apply to usage for grants that start or expire mid-billing period.
For example, if a credit grant’s effective date is Dec 11, the grant’s balance will not be applied to usage accrued from Dec 1 - Dec 10. Similarly, if a grant’s expiration date is Dec 25, it will not apply to usage accrued between Dec 25 and the end of the billing period. For existing customers, we’ll be reaching out to implement this change and you can also contact your Metronome representative to learn more.
Plan details API returns overage rates
Customers can view overage rates for custom currencies using the /planDetails API call. See docs here.
Metronome webhooks now come from a static set of IP addresses
For additional security in the webhook validation process, customers can create an allowlist of IP addresses that Metronome webhook notifications may come from. See the list of IP addresses here.
Events page improvements
Sub-line items included in CSV downloads
Previously, the download CSV option in the Metronome UI only showed top-level line items. We released an update to include the breakdown of all sub-line items for greater visibility for internal teams.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Metronome representative.
Fall is here! As we head into sweater weather and crunchy leaves season, we’re back with updates on what we’ve shipped in August and September. This changelog includes our new docs refresh, expanded data types for data export, and improvements to our integrations, APIs, and UI.
We’ve done a complete redesign of our docs! Our goal was to make it easier for both business and technical stakeholders who interact with Metronome and Metronome data to quickly get up to speed on Metronome, easily navigate content, and clearly understand how Metronome works with your existing quote-to-cash process. Updates include a new design, new information architecture, and expanded content. View our updated docs here.
We’ve expanded cloud marketplace support to include Azure Marketplace. If you’re interested in beta access, please contact your Metronome representative. Docs are also available here.
Enrich Salesforce records and give go-to-market teams more insight into customer information by passing relevant custom fields from Metronome to Salesforce.
Created a new API endpoint to return a list of customers on a specific plan. This endpoint can be used to batch pricing and packaging changes, identify upsell opportunities, and conduct usage tracking and analysis by plan. Note that this endpoint applies to active plans only. See API docs here.
Shipped performance optimizations for faster overall search performance within the Metronome app.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Metronome representative.
Hope everyone is staying cool with the dog days of summer behind us! The Metronome team just got back from an energizing offsite near Plumas National Forest and we’re ready to take on the second half of the year. This changelog is a doubleheader on what we’ve shipped in June and July and includes invoice presentation updates with Stripe, multiple UI, API, and data export improvements, and expanded features for embeddable dashboards.
Stripe’s recent updates to their integration API allow Metronome to send high-precision unit prices, providing a better invoice experience for your customers. Previously, Metronome quantity was reflected in the line item description, line item quantities were set as 1, and unit price was set to Metronome quantity x Metronome unit price.
We’re continuously investing in making Metronome easier to use for business users and have shipped several UI improvements:
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Metronome representative.
We’re heading into the second half of the year (can you believe it?) and had another busy month of building. In addition to launching a QuickBooks integration, we also invested in integration and API improvements for faster performance, improved usability, and better reporting.
Metronome now supports automatically pushing invoices to QuickBooks Online. Easily sync invoices to your accounting system and streamline your invoicing workflows. Reach out to your Metronome representative to get started.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Metronome representative.
Spring is in full bloom and we’re back with the April edition of In Tempo. This month we’re excited to share the investments we’ve made in enterprise-grade security as well as new functionality in the Metronome app that simplifies integration workflows and customer management.
Billing is a key part of a company’s financial system, making it critical to ensure the right access controls are in place. With the release of RBAC, customers can now easily manage user access and permissions.
Metronome supports three default roles as well as custom roles depending on an organization’s needs. The default roles are:
RBAC is available to all customers who have SSO set up with Metronome. Contact your Metronome representative if you’re interested in setting up RBAC or SSO and see our docs for additional information.
Entity mappings on custom fields give customers the ability to manage integrations between Metronome and their tech stack. For example, you could use entity mapping to map the ‘stripe_product_id’ custom field in Metronome to a ‘Product’ or ‘Charge’ on a Stripe invoice. You could also map the ‘tax_code’ custom field in Metronome to a Stripe invoice to enable downstream tax integrations.
To create or update entity mappings between Metronome and 3rd party integrations, visit General Settings > Integrations.
Customers now have the option to sign and verify usage events before sending them into Metronome. This security feature ensures the authenticity of every usage event and confirms they originated from your infrastructure. If you’re interested in enabling this capability, please contact your Metronome representative.
We’ve streamlined the process to add ingest aliases to customers. Now you can add them directly while creating a customer. Previously, you would need to navigate to the Settings tab and add aliases individually after a customer was created.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Metronome representative.
In the spirit of March Madness, our team took on March with focus, speed, and a winning attitude to ship some slam-dunk new features. This month's changelog is packed with exciting new releases including custom fields, expanded data export support, audit logs, quantity conversions, and more.
We’re excited to introduce adding custom fields to Metronome entities such as customers, products, charges, and credit grants. This feature reinforces our ability to serve as the source of truth for usage, billing, and customer data. It also helps us power more integrations by making it easier to connect Metronome data to other systems. See our blog post and our docs to learn more.
We've expanded data export support to include sending raw ingested usage events to your data warehouse. This data can be used for custom analytics, auditing, and troubleshooting of event data. See our docs here to learn more and contact your Growth representative if you’re interested in getting started.
As part of our commitment to security, we’ve released our audit log functionality which tracks all actions that resulted in a change across your Metronome environments. This feature is currently available through our API and will be available in the UI soon. See our docs here for more information.
With this new alert type, get notified when customer usage exceeds a threshold for any defined billable metric. This is helpful to automatically discover increases in customer usage, whether to detect anomalies or identify upsell opportunities. See our docs here to learn more and contact your Growth representative if you’d like to implement this alert type.
Customers now have the ability to divide a quantity derived from a customer’s billable metric usage. Instead of asking your data pipeline team to update their schema, you can now use this feature to perform unit conversions on data after it has been sent to Metronome.
Prepare for upcoming product launches or pricing changes by scheduling plan edits to take effect on a specific date.
Customers can now add one-time charges to draft invoices before they have been finalized in Metronome. This enables finance stakeholders to create ad-hoc invoices for products that are offered without a pre-defined billing schedule. Examples are a fee for a project milestone reached, professional services hours, or to correct an invoice that undercharged the customer in a prior billing period due to an outage.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Growth representative.
Happy Daylight Savings Week! As we adjust our clocks and our sleep schedules, spring forward with us as we dive into what we shipped in February.
Our SOC 1 Type 2 certification demonstrates our ability to provide accurate and reliable financial reporting for our customers. See why we pursued our SOC 1 certification and how it helps streamline your financial audit process in our blog post here.
As part of our continuous investment in connecting critical billing data with the systems you use, we’ve expanded the data that can be directly exported from Metronome to your data warehouse.
We now support sending finalized credit data which includes credit grants, finalized credit grant deductions, and credit types. See our docs here. Contact your Growth representative if you’re interested in implementing this feature.
We’ve improved our internal tooling to enable copying plans between sandbox and production environments. Copying a plan includes its associated products and billable metrics. Contact your Growth representative to learn more.
Customers now have the added option to void a credit grant over API. Note that you cannot void a grant if any amount of the grant’s credits have already been applied to a finalized usage invoice. See our docs here.
We’ve improved our chaos testing process to streamline our ability to run this for customers. We encourage chaos ingest testing to validate that retries are implemented properly in the event of system downtime.
By introducing artificial failures into our ingest endpoint, we can verify that our customers’ systems are responding correctly to a failure. Contact your Growth representative to learn more.
Quickly focus the search box in the Metronome UI by pressing cmd+k (macOS) or ctrl+k (Linux/Windows) or ‘/’. You can unfocus and clear the search box with ‘esc’. You can also hover over the search box to see the shortcuts tooltip.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Growth representative.
Well, it’s official, Punxsutawney Phil has seen his shadow for the 108th time. While we have a few more weeks of winter ahead, our January changelog is here and packed with new features and improvements.
We continue to invest in getting your critical billing data into the systems your team use. With this feature, you now have the flexibility to build reports and dashboards in your analytics tools. We support destinations including Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, S3, and more. You can read more about what's available in our docs here.
If you’re interested in setting this up, contact your Growth representative to get started. Additional data that can be exported will be available in the coming months, so stay tuned!
Customers now have more flexibility in how credits can be used. In addition to automatically granting credits for any customer assigned to a plan, credits can also be applied to designated products. This helps in use cases where you want to offer recurring credits to customers for specific SKUs. See our docs here.
We’ve expanded business model support to include volume-based pricing. In both volume-based pricing and tiered pricing, you define a set of ranges and a unit price for each range. For volume-based pricing, when usage reaches a new range, all usage acquires the unit price of the highest range reached. In tiered pricing, only usage that falls in the defined range is charged that unit price. See our docs here.
This release makes it possible to void a grant with a credit purchase invoice that has an issue date in the past. To do so, first void the credit purchase invoice and then void the grant. See our docs here.
Service period has always been passed as metadata on invoices and we’ve now added functionality to show it on the invoice itself. If you’re interested in turning this on, please contact your Growth representative.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Growth representative.
Welcome to the first In Tempo of 2023! Last week, we had the entire team together in San Francisco - it’s amazing to see how much we’ve grown since our last offsite and to reflect on what we’ve accomplished and what’s ahead.
We’re energized to continue building a product that makes billing less painful and grateful to work with a team that has a ton of fun together (ask us our thoughts on The Princess Bride, decadent cakes, and mullets). Also, if you know folks interested in new opportunities, we're hiring!.
We now sync invoice status changes from Stripe into Metronome. You can see the status in the Metronome UI or as part of the response when you fetch invoices from our API. This highly requested feature helps us continue to serve as the billing source-of-truth for our customers.
With this feature, you’ll now have:
Read more in our docs here.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Growth representative.
It’s the coziest time of the year - when holiday music takes over our radios, temperatures drop, and we bundle up in our favorite winter gear. Hope you’re staying warm and ready to dive into November’s product updates.
For customers with a credit model, our new alert for low remaining credit allows you to trigger an alert if a customer’s total active credit balance goes below your set percentage threshold.
For self-serve motions, create automated marketing campaigns to drive new credit purchases. For enterprise motions, notify sales and success to identify upsell and renewal opportunities. For more details, see our docs here.
In addition to this alert type, Metronome supports alerting on low credit balance reached, spend threshold reached, and low remaining days in plan.
Composite charges now support modeling percentage-based and minimum charges. As a refresher, composite charges are charges that are a function of other charges. In this new release, you can now model charge, product, or product group minimums.
For example, if you have a usage-based charge that you’d like to set a minimum monthly charge of $100, you can create a minimum and point it at that charge. If usage of the charge is $80 at the end of the month, the minimum charge will be $20 to ensure the $100 minimum monthly charge is met. See our docs here.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! To learn more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Growth representative.
It's getting colder, the leaves are changing, and it's time for our October edition of In Tempo! While we continued a steady drumbeat of shipping features, the team also traveled to San Diego for GraphQL Summit and overseas to Dublin, Ireland for SaaStock. We met hundreds of folks in person, met with some of our amazing customers, and had great conversations on all things consumption pricing.
This feature enables you to easily view raw events as they enter Metronome, so you can get a pulse on event trends and volume, and analyze event data. Use cases include finding events for a specific customer or ingest alias, seeing events that matched a billable metric, looking up a transaction ID, finding duplicate events, and visualizing your event volume in a given period. You can find the events explorer under the Developers section in the Metronome app.
We’ve launched three new endpoints for plan details, plan charges, and customer-specific price adjustments, so your team can pull pricing and packaging data directly from Metronome.
Enjoying our changelog? Have feedback on how we can improve it? We’d love to hear from you! If you’re interested in learning more about these features, you can get in touch with us here or reach out to your Growth representative.
Welcome to the first edition of In Tempo, our monthly changelog. Why In Tempo? We're shipping at a fast and steady pace and this changelog is our way for customers to stay in tempo with what we're building.
Integrating spend signals into your systems and workflows just got easier. You can now create alerts in the Metronome UI without any engineering effort. Use alerts to gate product access, drive upgrades, enable cost controls, and more. Our recent blog post shares more details.
Provide a complete view of customers in one place. Our new Salesforce integration brings in real-time usage and spend insights, so your sales team can drive adoption and identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities at the right time. Check out our blog post and see our documentation for more information.
Test out new pricing and packaging updates with Sandbox mode. This feature is now available in the Metronome UI for all customers.
Streamline account provisioning and management with SSO. Contact us here or reach out to your Growth representative if you're interested in implementing SSO.
Explore and interact with Metronome's API without writing code. Our new Postman Collection makes it easy to get started with Metronome. Learn more here.
Learn more about our SOC 2 Type 2 Certification here. Data privacy and security is a top priority we continue to invest in and we are proud of the policies and procedures we've put in place to reach this milestone.
If you have ideas, questions, or feedback, please let us know! If you're interested in learning more about Metronome, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Growth representative.
And just like that, fall is upon us! September was an exciting month at Metronome - we sponsored Kong Summit in San Francisco and had a great time meeting developers in person. We also built new features and functionality including embeddable dashboards, automated credit grants, and additional plan alerts.
Easily display invoice and usage data to your customers, so they can understand and monitor usage trends over time. Update the dashboard to your brand colors for a consistent user experience. Embeddable dashboards are available to all customers. Learn how to get started here.
Set up a recurring or one-time credit grant when creating a plan. This includes granting free trial credits or modeling a recurring, prepaid, credit-based business model. This feature is available to all customers. See the documentation here.
Create alerts that are triggered when a customer has a specified number of days remaining in their plan. This enables your go-to-market teams to create automated outreach or connect with customers to get ahead of renewal conversations. See our docs here. To get started, contact us here or reach out to your Growth representative.
We’d love to hear any ideas, questions, or feedback you have! If you’re interested in learning more about these features, get in touch with us here or reach out to your Growth representative.