Salad, an innovative container-as-a-service (CaaS) provider, offers distributed cloud services powered by everyday users who share their computing resources. Their marketplace business model enables them to provide cost-effective GPU cloud services on SaladCloud to individuals and businesses. As the company prepared to accelerate their go-to-market efforts in the generative AI space, they required a robust, adaptable, and efficient billing solution—and in Metronome, Salad found the perfect fit for their pricing model and business growth. 

Automating invoices for scale 

Salad’s first few years were focused on ensuring they had a strong network of compute resources. As the company geared up to build out customer acquisition efforts, they knew they needed to migrate from the existing manual, spreadsheet-based invoicing process to an automated billing platform. Scalability was a key focus across the business and billing was a foundational area that would need to support Salad’s customer growth.

“Our goal was to launch a product-led growth motion. Manual processes couldn’t scale with our fast-paced customer acquisition strategy,” said Salad's Director of Product Management, Daniel Sarfati. 

Implementing a flexible billing solution, quickly ‍

Salad required a billing platform that was dynamic and adaptable – one that could support a high-growth, self-serve motion and had built-in pricing flexibility for quick changes as they built out their go-to-market efforts. Moreover, expert guidance was crucial as Salad evolved its complex pricing strategy.

“To build a sustainable business, our pricing and packaging needs to mirror the value our customers receive. Metronome’s ease of use, especially with pricing experimentation, was a game-changer for our growth journey.” 

Igniting product-led growth‍

Metronome’s platform was the right fit to support Salad’s self-serve motion and made it easy to automate the onboarding process, track usage, and facilitate monthly invoicing. Moreover, Metronome's comprehensive credits system eliminated engineering bottlenecks and empowered Salad's sales team to offer free trial credits, fostering a smooth and engaging user experience from the start.

“Metronome has revolutionized our lead generation by making it easy to provision and manage our free trial credits. Building and maintaining such a system would have been incredibly difficult on our own. With Metronome, it’s effortless.”

Transparent billing with seamless integrations‍

Integration was key to Salad's billing strategy. By connecting Metronome with existing tools like Stripe and HubSpot, Salad achieved a unified workflow that was automated and easy to manage. Coupled with Metronome’s customer alerting features and embeddable dashboards, Salad was able to offer real-time usage transparency to customers and better spend management.

“Our clients now enjoy real-time expenditure insights, an upgrade we couldn’t have offered without Metronome.” 
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Managing billing sans engineering support‍

Metronome's UI empowered Salad's product team to assume full control over all billing aspects, giving them the ability to manage pricing updates, discounting, and credits without engineering effort. In turn, they save significant time and reduce manual effort previously required to implement changes. This autonomy drastically reduced dependence on technical resourcing, allowing the focus to turn to monetization strategies and continuing to build an excellent Salad experience.

“The amount of management Metronome has saved us is monumental. Product is able to set up and manage billing for customers in a low-effort and straightforward way, without pulling in engineering resources. Thanks to Metronome, we don’t need anyone dedicated full-time to billing.” 

Effortless pricing iterations and experimentation‍

In the crucial early stages of monetization, Salad was able to get up and running quickly. As they grew, Metronome's platform facilitated easy updates to pricing, metrics customization for enterprise clients, and much more—all without engineering support.  

“When we first implemented Metronome, we had a straightforward pricing model. We’ve introduced more complexity with custom enterprise agreements and it’s been amazing to have the flexibility with Metronome to support these contracts with ease.”

Empowering customers with real-time insights‍

Through Metronome's platform, Salad elevated its customer experience to new heights. By offering end-of-month visibility, transparent dashboards, and proactive spend management alerts, Salad has made significant strides in enhancing customer satisfaction with more insight and control on their usage. 

Swift deployment and an ongoing partnership ‍

Salad’s collaboration with Metronome brought about a billing operations overhaul in just two weeks. Not only was the implementation incredibly efficient, but Metronome’s expertise was invaluable for Salad—especially since they were navigating the complexities of usage-based billing for the first time. This close partnership will continue to support Salad’s growth and pricing explorations in the future. 

“I anticipated billing implementation to be daunting. With Metronome, it’s a concern of the past. Having a partner like Metronome, who not only provides a billing solution but also offers insights and forward-thinking ideas, has been incredibly impactful for our growth.”