Amberflo

How is a Metering Service different from a logging or monitoring service?

Hey ProductHunt 👋 Puneet and Lior here, founders of Amberflo.io 🤝 www.amberflo.io https://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. 💡 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. 👋 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 Cloud Monetize 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 📶 Billing Cloud Accurate, 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. ⬇️

How do you guys scale?

Great presentation! Congratulations!

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!

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.

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".