• Home
/
• FAQs

FAQs: General Questions

Question: What is m3ter and what does usage-based pricing (UBP) mean?

m3ter helps software companies deploy usage-based pricing (UBP) for their products and services. UBP is a consumption-based pricing model where customers pay for what they use. It enhances or replaces traditional SaaS recurring subscription pricing models.

m3ter's data-first solution offers a robust and reliable data collection and management infrastructure, which allows you to quickly set up metered usage data collection schemas for customer consumption of your products and services. From there, it's a small step to implement usage-based rating and pricing against those products and services. m3ter integrates easily with your existing quote-to-cash tooling stack, contains an in-built and highly-configurable billing engine for billing automation and management, and allows usage and spending data to be exploited and fed into other analytical or general business systems to support general operational workflows.  

Question: Why should I switch to offering UBP for my customers?

UBP isn’t right for every SaaS company, but where there is a good fit it reduces adoption friction, allows cost-free upsell, controls gross margins, and is appealing to customers because there’s no waste and a strong link to value.

Usage-based public SaaS companies are valued at a substantial premium compared with the broader SaaS index, with average revenue multiples at 21.6x vs 14.4x, according to OpenView Partners*.

*OpenView Partners - The State of Usage-Based Pricing 2021 

Question: Why should I use m3ter instead of building my own system?

m3ter is a specialist usage metering and rating solution designed to satisfy highly-complex UBP pricing models.

By using m3ter, you will reduce cost. On average, in-house solutions cost $500K to build and $300K yearly to maintain. (The estimated costs are from a private survey of [150+] leading SaaS companies by an investor in the space.) 

You will also eliminate execution risk and complexity, since m3ter is a proven solution that integrates well with popular quote-to-cash tooling. For example, native integrations with Stripe, Netsuite, and Paddle that you set up yourself, or Chargebee and Salesforce amongst many other m3ter open-API framework integrations.

As expert leaders in the UBP field, we provide a service that enables you to:

1. Capture usage data.

2. Apply pricing in real time.

3. Automate billing operations.

4. Deliver usage and spend data where it is needed throughout your organization.

Question: How soon can I start using your platform?

Contact us at m3ter for an initial call to discuss your UBP requirements, and how we can help to meet your usage-based pricing needs.

Once you're granted access to m3ter, you can set yourself up in a few days using 4 easy steps:

1. Configure meters. Define your usage data measurements and their attributes, and any custom logic to be applied on the fly. Then choose how you want to ingest data (API, file, streaming etc.)

2. Configure pricing. Define pricing and its supporting aggregations at product catalog and customer level, using our easy-to-use configuration tool set.

3. Integrate systems. Use our integrations to link m3ter with your upstream and downstream systems and map accounts and data fields to implement seamless data transfer.

4. Define permissions. Set up role types and permissions using our security and access management tools.

Additional Support