AccelByte Scales With Confidence Thanks to m3ter

The gaming industry is booming, with revenues approaching half a trillion dollars in 2024. But behind every successful online game lies a complex backend challenge: infrastructure and monetization systems that are often rebuilt from scratch, consuming valuable engineering time.

AccelByte set out to change that.

The company provides modular backend services that game developers can plug in and scale with. Their platform supports everything from accounts and matchmaking to global server orchestration and crash reporting so studios can focus on building great games instead of reinventing infrastructure.

Why AccelByte Needed m3ter

For AccelByte’s Private Cloud offering, manual billing had been manageable: finance and business teams reviewed usage data, calculated charges in spreadsheets, and sent invoices manually - for a small number of high value customers. 

But things changed in 2024 when they soft-launched Shared Cloud, a a self-service offering for a new segment of customers with: 

• Free sign-up, no credit card required
• Three-month trial
• $100 monthly minimum + usage-based pricing (based on Peak Concurrent Users, or PCCU)

“The vision was: no people at AccelByte should be required to run and manage the platform,” Jeremy said. “Manual billing worked for large enterprise customers. But it wouldn’t scale to Shared Cloud’s open, hands-off model.”

They needed to fully automate usage tracking, metering, and billing fast. 

They considered building in-house, but quickly ruled it out:

“From day one, we were focused on time to market. Reinventing the wheel just wasn’t realistic,” said Jeremy. “We needed a solution that worked, and worked now.”

Why AccelByte Chose m3ter Over Building In-House Billing

Why m3ter? Capabilities + Partnership

“We looked at a lot of providers, but no one had true usage-based billing at the level we needed,” said Jeremy. “m3ter had the capabilities. And just as importantly, they had the support.”

AccelByte was especially impressed with:

• Ease of use: Fast product/pricing setup
• Gaming fluency: No need to over-explain their use case
• Responsive support: Smooth implementation across legal, business, and technical stakeholders

They also appreciated how easily m3ter integrated with their payment solution, Paddle: enabling automated self-service signup and billing flows for Shared Cloud.

m3ter Impact: What Changed

1. Metering + Translation to Billing
m3ter connects directly with AccelByte’s usage pipelines, automatically calculating customer bills.

“That’s the nuts and bolts. Now we track usage and convert it to dollars instantly.”

2. Catching Data Issues
Even before full implementation, m3ter helped uncover inconsistencies in AccelByte’s usage data, streamlining internal fixes and strengthening accuracy.

3. Real-Time Transparency for Customers
With the shift from Hourly Active Users to PCCU, customers get real-time insights into usage and cost.

“We show graphs and numbers in our platform, customers can see updates hourly,” said Jeremy. “Before, they had to wait for a monthly invoice. Now, it’s transparent from day one.”

How AccelByte Gained Real-Time Usage Visibility with m3ter

4. Easy Pricing Changes
AccelByte has updated pricing 4–5 times since launching in August 2024.

“We haven’t had to rewrite services to make changes. We can just create new billing templates,” Jeremy said. “Our business team doesn’t have to wait months for changes anymore.”

5. Enabling Higher Customer Volumes
Manual billing might have worked for a few big clients, but Shared Cloud changed the game.

“Those big spreadsheets? Gone. It’s all automated now. We couldn’t have launched Shared Cloud without m3ter.”

Bottom Line: Scale Without Worry

For AccelByte, m3ter wasn’t just a billing solution - it was a launch partner for their next growth phase.

The partnership has freed up engineering time, enabled faster pricing iteration, and helped them serve new market segments all without growing their finance headcount.

With game development speeding up and infrastructure complexity rising, AccelByte is proving that you don’t need to build it all yourself to build something great.