The post announced that FinTech Stripe had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the software services usage-based billing platform Metronome.
The agreement was revealed in a Tuesday (Dec. 2) post on X by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, who said the company will combine Metronome’s features with the rest of its Stripe Billing platform.
“Metered pricing is the native business model for the [artificial intelligence (AI)] era,” Collison said in the post. “As far as we can see, the corresponding shift in how companies earn revenue may be as large as the introduction of SaaS. (It could also prove to be significantly larger.)”
Metronome CEO Scott Woody wrote in a post on Tuesday on X that he was proud to announce that Metronome “is now moving to the big leagues,” as it has signed a definitive agreement to join Stripe.
“Metronome isn’t going away — we’re going to scale way, way, way up with all the resources and Amazon talent that company has to offer,” Woody wrote in the post.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Woody explained that the partnership combines Stripe’s payments functionality with Metronome’s monetization capabilities.
He also said that by joining Stripe’s product suite, Metronome will be able to serve all customers’ interests across a range of business models and make quicker progress on features it couldn’t deliver as quickly before, such as adding seat-based credits, real-time spend alerts, and hierarchical accounts.
“Having spent time with company senior leadership, I am now convinced we both see the same future for monetization,” Woody said in the blog post. ‘We believe that billing can be a hated backwater in communications into a real revenue operating system for every software company. Faster product launches, real-time telemetry, and automated finance workflows are not nice-to-haves; they are essential. They are levers for growth.”
In September, at its Stripe Tour New York product show, the company introduced new features that help businesses better monetize their AI products.
Those offerings include features in Stripe Billing that make it easier to execute hybrid revenue models; a new application programming interface that allows companies to plug into providers of large language models and track changes in the cost of making an inference; and a feature in Stripe Radar clamping down on abuse of free-trial periods and other types of “friendly fraud.”
