The best alternative for Stripe usage-based billing

Tired of Stripe Billing limitations? Metronome removes billing roadblocks so you can scale without headaches
No inflexible ingestion forcing constant engineering rework
No rigid pricing structures that requires custom billing logic
No manual account-by-account updates for pricing iteration
Trusted by industry leaders
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Trusted by industry leaders
“Stripe couldn’t handle the usage-related dimensions we’d been capturing. Those should have allowed us to display more granular usage data on invoices and to group org- or app-associated charges, but we really hit a wall there.”
Jon Phenow
Staff Software Engineer

Why teams choose Metronome over Stripe Billing

Stripe is great for payments but struggles with usage-based billing. Here’s why teams turn to Metronome for a more flexible and scalable billing solution.

Launch faster

Companies need the flexibility to move fast and keep pricing aligned with product value.
Metronome
Stripe billing
Supports pay-as-you-go, hybrid, prepaid, postpaid, cloud marketplace, and reseller models—right out of the box.
Lacks essential prepaid credit features, including rollover, overage, payment and access schedules, and non-monetary credit support.
Charges by any combination of factors like data volume, region, or resource type using multi-dimensional pricing.
Can’t charge by multiple variables without clunky workarounds.

Mix and match annual subscriptions with monthly pay-as-you-go billing in a single contract.
All items in a subscription must share the same billing cycle.
Customize pricing and discounts for specific contracts without hacks or custom logic.
No built-in support for complex discounts, multi-year commits, or negotiated pricing terms for enterprise customers.

Iterate pricing without friction

In usage-based pricing, you need to iterate pricing as quickly as you ship features.
Metronome
Stripe billing
Adjust pricing logic with SQL billable metrics without changing data pipelines.
Strict 1:1 event-to-metric mapping forces pipeline changes for every pricing update.
Manage all pricing changes in one place without manually creating individual pricing tables.
Each pricing dimension needs a separate price object, leading to SKU sprawl.
Roll out global updates while preserving custom discounts and terms.
Bulk pricing updates are not supported, requiring custom scripts for migrations.
Update pricing once, apply it everywhere across all or a cohort of customers.
Every pricing adjustment requires engineering effort, slowing down go-to-market speed.

Connect billing to your product experience

Usage-based billing is now part of your product experience.
Metronome
Stripe billing
Let customers drill down into spend by time, project, region, or any custom dimension for detailed cost breakdowns.
No usage data properties, making it hard for customers to understand their spend.
Real-time spend and usage alerts help customers stay in control of their budget.
No daily spend visibility, increasing the risk of budget overruns.
Automated balance reload prevents service interruptions and protects against fraud.
No real-time spend alerts, leading to unexpected billing surprises.

Act on usage and spend data

Finance, product, and sales teams need real-time insights to take actions.
Metronome
Stripe billing
Granular, raw usage events and billing data give teams complete visibility into revenue and customer behavior.
No event-level usage records, making it difficult to analyze usage patterns and revenue drivers.
Structured exports ensure clean, detailed, and audit-ready data for finance teams.

Lack of commit structure makes revenue recognition challenging, such as deferred revenue itemization.