Developer-first, Cloud Metering and Usage-Based Pricing and Billing Platform built from the ground up to enable modern Usage-Based Pricing with real-time metering, and on-demand invoicing and billing.
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How is a Metering Service different from a logging or monitoring service?
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@alexander_wurm Metering is built from the ground up with the principles of accuracy and durability in mind. That is to say, a metering service cannot drop, lose, or not process records. Amberflo is built to ensure accuracy by way of idempotency and data deduplication; each record is processed once and once only. We guarantee this with full event lifecycle visibility (audit trail) from the moment of ingestion to Amberflo.
Observability technologies are built to monitor the system as a whole without capturing and separating usage by customer or instance. To use a metaphor, observability technologies give a 30,000 foot view whereas metering allows you to zoom in to the ground level.
@alexander_wurm Metering === Accurate (Billable) usage instrumentation platform != Product analytics != Observability.
When I try to explain the difference between metering and other forms of usage statistics, I ask “What is the impact if your logs are missing for one hour? What if some misconfiguration caused your Amplitude data to miss 30 minutes?”
But what if your billable usage data is missing an hour? This is a totally different story. Trying to recover and reprocess historical events is very tricky when you first test that pipeline after an incident. And how to guarantee that every event that should be processed is, once and only once? To bill customers on this data it must be correct and auditable at all times.A metering service === Accurate (Billable, Auditable) usage instrumentation platform where the design principles guarantee accuracy (Idempotency and Deduplication built-in) is an emerging infrastructure category that companies (AWS, Snowflake, Twilio, others…) have previously had to build themselves.
@alexander_wurm Thanks Alexander. It's a commonly asked question. And the awareness around how it is different is growing and being appreciated.
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@alexander_wurm There are all kinds of major differences between usage based pricing systems to logging or monitoring. I would say aside from accuracy (which does play a big role here), the main differences are in what you try to measure, how you construct your events, and what kind of applications consume the data of your events.Â
Logging system events or metrics usually don't have a very defined structure, and can even be just text (pretty much). Also usually those events describe something that happened at some specific point in time.
UBP systems events are to measure customer's usage over time. These specific types of events always have the customer, so everything you measure is related to your customers. Time also plays a big role in this type of events. Unlike logging here we measure a phenomena that happens over a time span, maybe even a long time, or maybe even something that is still happening.
From this we can see that UBP systems events are more structured, and so can be integrated with other applications. For example the pricing and billing systems. Because the events are more structured and contain the customer and the time-span we can use these events to come up with a usage based pricing plan, promotions, prepaid, or pay-as-you-go tools which are solely based on the customer usage.
Last I'll mention that indeed because UBP systems involve pricing and billings (actual money) they are also much safer and accurate than logging systems (in addition to deduplication we also have many mechanisms for making sure billing is reconciled with usage, that usage can be canceled in case bad input was sent to Amberflo, etc).
Hey ProductHunt đź‘‹
Puneet and Lior here, founders of Amberflo.io 🤝
www.amberflo.iohttps://docs.amberflo.io/docs
We started Amberflo with a mission to help transition the world to a more fair and transparent business model - in the form of Usage-Based Pricing (UBP).
We spent a lot of time at Amazon Web Services (AWS) building and scaling Usage-Based cloud services with on-demand metered pricing, invoicing and billing and saw first-hand the spectacular benefits of leading with a Usage-Based business model. It drives the highest levels of revenue and product adoption, while reducing friction and improving overall organizational efficiency. And offering users a business model that is fully aligned with value and outcome.
We also experienced first-hand the challenges of designing, building, maintaining and scaling a platform that needed to consistently deliver accurate metering and real-time usage-based pricing and billing.
đź’ˇ Amberflo is the platform we wished we had!
Building the necessary infrastructure and tooling to enable accurate Metering and Usage-Based Pricing is a heavy lift, and requires a long and drawn out product roadmap and features. We feel companies can greatly benefit from having a reliable, scalable, fully-managed, and cost-effective platform delivered by Amberflo versus spending prized core engineering and product resources on building it in-house.
đź‘‹ How is Amberflo different?
We lead with Metering, not as a feature of pricing and billing but as a decoupled, stand alone platform product, that while integrated with our Billing Cloud operates and scales independently. This allows product and engineering teams to holistically and comprehensively instrument their technology stack, irrespective of customer facing pricing vectors.
✌️ Metering as a product (not a feature)
Full-featured Cloud Metering Service. De-coupled (yet integrated) with Pricing and Billing.
Use Metering independent of pricing and billing.
✌️ 100% Developer and API First
Built AWS style as developer and API first
Rich SDKs.
Easy integration, automation, and extension
✌️ Generous Free Tier
100 Million Meter Events free in 1st month (contact us if you need more)
1 Million Meter Events free each month (forever)
First 25 invoices free
No per user or per customer based pricing. No hidden charges.
✌️ Self-service
Sign up directly on our website
No credit card needed
Platform Features:
🛠️ Metering CloudMonetize APIs, Platforms, and Marketplaces
- Meter any resource for any use case at any scale
- Pre-built meter aggregation types
- Ingest meter events; see aggregated and grouped values in real-time
- Build-in Time Series data warehouse and dashboards
- Highly scalable. Easily and accurately ingest billions of meter events
- Highly cost-effective. 1/10th to 1/100th the cost of doing it yourself
- Fully automated via APIs and scripting
đź“¶ Billing CloudAccurate, real-time, on-demand Metered Invoicing and Billing
- Turn meter events into customer facing pricing plans and line items
- Build any type of Usage-Based or Hybrid pricing plans
- Prepaid credits with usage drawn-down in real time
- Granular level discounts
- Price Modeling
- Usage and Billing Customer Portal (with drop-in UI widgets)
- Fully automated via APIs and scripting
We’d love to know what you think! Let us know if you have any questions and we’ll respond in the comments below. ⬇️
@bobby_khattri Hi Bobby. We have a cloud native architecture that enables us to horizontally scale in real-time. We leverage several cloud computing foundational primitives to achieve this. We encourage you to give it a try. Push as many meters into Amberflo as you like, at the scale you like. Your first 100 Million meter events for the first month are free. If you would like to test with a greater volume (billions of meters) let us know, and we'll up your test limit.
@bobby_khattri Thanks for this question. We have built this platform to scale and support Ingesting billions of events. With metering design principles from cloud providers, keeping Idempotency and deduplication in any step of the pipeline https://docs.amberflo.io/docs/du...
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@bobby_khattri Just wanted to add to what other mentioned - the system is built for massive scale. And by "massive scale" we mean that we can easily handle ingestion of billions of events per month per account, and you still be able to query our system and pull real time usage statistics or real time invoices in a matter of a seconds!
Such a powerful platform! Metering is the foundation for a host of incredible applications, starting with billing and invoicing. So excited for your launch! Congrats!
@satyap Thanks Satya. We wouldn't be here without your support. And as we used to say at Amazon - it's Day 1.
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It's exciting to have a front-row seat observing such a transformative shift in how the tech community buys and sells solutions. Can't wait to see Amberflo's continued success helping customers enable and optimize usage-based pricing.
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Writing this as a Product Manager whose job it is to build, maintain and enhance a billing platform, as well as on-premises agents and cloud metering services. I cover a $1 billion market for my company and focus on Usage as the focus of my role.
Having tested and played with Amberflo using their free-tier (yes free, so there is no reason not to try it!), I'm very impressed with what they have brought to the table. The Usage-Based Billing and Pricing space is still very early.
As companies look to take on metering and billing in a consumption like fashion, Amberflo provides an extremely easy onboarding experience, and makes integrating into the necessary data model seem almost as easy as using Microsoft's Power Automate tooling (it's VERY easy, in case you aren't aware).
The calculation models provided cover several different ways to charge for your product and align with many of the different ways companies use consumption models today. By providing a processing layer, and providing an easy model to implement it, you can go from product usage data, to generating a bill fairly quickly.
One of the gotcha's that you'll need to be cognizant of is how much data you generate, as this affects your cost of the service.
Its a full service billing solution, so you'll have the ability to work across:
• Usage Data Ingestion
• Usage Calculation
• End-User / Customer Management
• Pricing Management
• Discounts
• Tiering
• Promotions
• Credits
• Prepay
• Rewards
• Currency Management
• Billing / Invoice Management
• Billing Processor Management
The only thing that's on you, is to generate usage data. That is an incredible position to be in, trust me. Building, maintaining and enhancing these functions can be extremely cumbersome. The level of control in the pricing management section should help any company not only get started in Usage-Based pricing, but it should help you succeed in handling one-off deals, customizations, and most of the craziness that you'll find your sales team tries to sell (Without talking with you first).
Could there be more? Sure. Support for two-tier seller models, complicated metering ingestion where you base pricing of multiple products based on a combination of data points (thats really just for me), and maybe contract models with different revenue recognition flows and revenue buckets. But thats typically something you'd need as a fortune 500 where you typically build your own. Again, this is a solution for the larger market and will meet the needs of 99.99% of companies out there. Are there other options on the market? Sure. But established companies like Stripe and Zuora put more of the usage side on your plate. Are there other companies doing as much as Amberflo? Sure but thats on you to do your due diligence. This is just a comment about Amberflo.
If you are looking for a solution to introduce Usage-Based Metering, Billing and Pricing then Amberflo gets you there and does a good job of supporting you. Give their free tier a shot. Why not? Its free! No better way to understand if it will work or not if you don't try and then throw some test data at it. As the homelab adage goes, "Test it, push it, unplug it, do your worst and see if it's still standing".
We were introduced to the Amberflo team by our lead investor at the start of our commercialization implementation. From our first meeting to our most recent (this past Tuesday) - Amberflo team has done a tremendous amount for us in term of saving our development time and serves as our unified platform for tracking usage, rewards, custom credit, and billing; seamlessly plugs between our application and blockchain layer.
The caliber of the team and the product they have build is top-notch.
@xiaoran_zhang Thank you! It is a pleasure working with you. We learned a lot helping personal.ai with metering, usage-based billing, rewards and it made our product much better.
@xiaoran_zhang Thank you Sharon. It's been super awesome working with you and your team. And we look forward to continuing to bring to you innovation in this area.
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@puneet_gupta1 Congratulations on the launch! This is a very helpful product. All the best :)
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