How Qumulo freed Engineering from billing and scaled without adding headcount

Qumulo provides unstructured data storage for enterprises, helping organizations manage and access large volumes of file data across on-prem and cloud environments. As their cloud business scaled, their internal billing setup wasn’t keeping pace. The team needed a solution that could support their sophisticated pricing models, reduce manual effort, and enable billing management without relying on Engineering. 

With m3ter, Qumulo transitioned to an automated, scalable billing platform — implemented and managed entirely by their business systems team

The Challenge

Manual processes, limited visibility, and engineering bottlenecks

Like many scaleups, Qumulo’s billing was originally developed by Engineering. It started as a simple equation: usage × rate, and it worked well in the early days. But as the business evolved, billing became harder to manage and less aligned with how teams needed to operate.

Engineering was responsible for maintaining billing logic, managing pricing updates, and handling customer exceptions, all outside of core product work. Meanwhile, finance and revenue accounting were working across spreadsheets and manual processes to track usage, apply pricing, and generate statements.

As Qumulo’s cloud footprint grew, so did the pressure on these systems:

• Engineers were maintaining and troubleshooting billing logic
• Prepay balances were tracked manually in spreadsheets
• Usage data had to be pulled and processed by hand
• Outages or missed usage submissions sometimes led to unbilled revenue
• The business lacked clear visibility into what was being billed and what wasn’t

Qumulo needed a way to bring billing under business control and to move faster without increasing overhead.

The Solution

A platform that handles billing complexity — and fits the stack

Qumulo needed a solution that could scale with their business and be owned by operations, not Engineering. That meant handling complex pricing logic — but also integrating cleanly into their existing systems.

They chose m3ter for three reasons:

• Out-of-the-box support for their pricing models: tiers, thresholds, regional and zonal pricing
• API-first architecture that allowed full automation and self-service configuration
• Seamless integration with Salesforce, NetSuite, Tableau, and Workato

This was essential for Qumulo’s non-technical business systems team, who needed to run billing independently — and automate end-to-end workflows, from rate cards to revenue recognition.

The Results

Scalable billing — built by one person, with no code

With m3ter, Qumulo completely rebuilt their billing process. The transformation was led by a single business systems lead, no Engineers, no Developers.

Within two months, they had launched billing for two products. In under eight, they had every product live across four clouds, three marketplaces, and 600+ pricing permutations.

All key workflows are now automated:

• Hourly usage ingest and rating
• Real-time burn-down dashboards
• Revenue recognition in NetSuite
• Customer usage alerts and plan switching
• Monthly statements via PDF, created automatically

What’s Next

Expanding usage-based billing across all deployment models

With core billing now running through m3ter, Qumulo is planning its next phase: expanding usage tracking across every environment, including customer-managed infrastructure.

The goal is to build a unified experience where customers can draw down from a single balance, whether they’re using Qumulo’s cloud offerings or deploying the product in their own data centers.

Even for customers on fixed contracts, Qumulo plans to meter usage to open the door to more flexible pricing models in the future and better support for their go-to-market teams.