Table of Content

Table of Content

Top 5 Billing Alternatives to Metronome for Usage Based Pricing and Billing

Top 5 Billing Alternatives to Metronome for Usage Based Pricing and Billing

Top 5 Billing Alternatives to Metronome for Usage Based Pricing and Billing

Top 5 Billing Alternatives to Metronome for Usage Based Pricing and Billing

Dec 27, 2025

Dec 27, 2025

Dec 27, 2025

10 mins

10 mins

10 mins

Aanchal Parmar

Aanchal Parmar

Aanchal Parmar

Product Marketing Manager, Flexprice

Product Marketing Manager, Flexprice

Product Marketing Manager, Flexprice

Best Metronome Billing Alternative
Best Metronome Billing Alternative
Best Metronome Billing Alternative
Best Metronome Billing Alternative
Best Metronome Billing Alternative

Metronome was built for a world where the core challenge was turning raw usage into billable metrics. For that, it’s excellent.

But today, the game has changed, pricing is no longer just about usage; it’s about credits, wallets, , faster experimentation and so much more.

Especially, with the recent Metronome acquisition by Stripe, makes it much harder for new AI companies, because even though we love Metronome as a product, it’s not wise to pick a tool that gets you locked in the Stripe’s ecosystem and roadmap. That’s where it stops being a complete billing solution and  you need to look for Metronome alternatives. 

The right Metronome alternative should scale from simple subscriptions to complex usage‑based models, support both developer and finance workflows, and integrate smoothly with your stack like Flexprice does. 

For teams that want more pricing agility, better finance control, and a smoother customer experience, here are the top 5 billing platforms that can be great Metronome alternatives.

Note: Even though this post is published on Flexprice, it’s not a biased roundup. We’ve evaluated every tool on its technical merit, flexibility, and developer experience exactly how we’d expect anyone building serious AI infrastructure to do.

TL;DR

  • Metronome is great at metering, but weak at full billing.

  • Modern AI & SaaS pricing needs more than usage to invoice.Teams need pricing agility, real-time visibility, experimentation, and unified invoices without constant engineering work.

  • Top Metronome alternatives to consider: Flexprice: Best overall alternative for AI & usage-heavy SaaS; Open-source, real-time metering, credits & wallets, ramped contracts, parent-child accounts, fast pricing experiments, strong finance visibility

  • Orb: Clean UI, simple use cases; Amberflo: Strong metering; Lago: Open-source, flexible starting point; Stripe Billing: Reliable for simple subscriptions

  • If you only need metering to billing: Metronome, Orb, or Amberflo can work.

  • If you need pricing agility + finance control + experimentation: Flexprice stands out.

  • Bottom line:Metronome solves usage measurement.

  • Flexprice solves modern monetization: pricing, credits, contracts, invoices, and experimentation in one system.

What is Metronome? 

Metronome is a usage‑based billing platform built to turn raw usage events like API calls, tokens, compute minutes, or inference requests into accurate, auditable bills for SaaS and AI products.

It works well for teams that need granular metering of events and simple usage‑based pricing. 

Metronome was built for a time when the primary problem was usage metering. But modern SaaS and AI products don’t just need metering,  they need full billing, pricing agility, and finance workflows.

When Metronome Starts to Break

1. It’s a metering layer, not a full billing platform

Metronome is excellent at turning events into billable metrics, but it’s not a complete billing system.

It doesn’t handle complex subscription lifecycles like mid‑cycle upgrades, proration, cancellations; multi‑product, multi‑plan contracts with mixed pricing models and unified invoices that combine subscriptions, usage, and credits. 

2. Pricing is not truly agile

Modern teams need to run pricing experiments, change usage logic frequently as products evolve and support customer‑specific plans and enterprise deals. 

With Metronome, every pricing change often requires updating rate cards, modifying event schemas, re‑processing historical data or building workarounds. This makes pricing slow, risky, and tightly coupled to engineering.

3. Credits and wallets are not first‑class

Metronome focuses on usage, not credits. It does not support per‑account credit wallets, auto top‑ups and promotions, credit expiry and rollover policies. 

If your pricing model relies on credits like prepaid credits, usage allowances, or credit‑based access, you end up building that layer yourself on top of Metronome, adding complexity and maintenance overhead.

4. Finance and RevOps workflows are limited

Metronome lacks real‑time dashboards for customers and internal teams, detailed reporting and forecasting tools and compliant revenue recognition and audit trails.

Finance teams are left waiting for invoices or exports to understand revenue impact, making it hard to forecast accurately, reconcile usage vs. billing and answer customer questions about consumption and charges.

6. Stripe acquisition changes priorities and flexibility

Since Metronome’s acquisition by Stripe, its roadmap and integrations are increasingly aligned with Stripe’s broader ecosystem. While this strengthens its fit for Stripe-centric stacks, it also means less flexibility for teams using other payment gateways or wanting to avoid vendor lock-in. Custom workflows, multi-gateway support, and independent billing logic become harder to maintain, pushing teams toward a more opinionated, Stripe-first architecture rather than a neutral, open billing foundation.

With Metronome, you will suffer with your pricing iterations, multi-currency billing and lose control over your billing logic. It is heavily developer dependent with limited forecasting modules and lacks detailed reporting tools for your customer’s visibility. 

Top 5 Usage Based Billing Alternatives to Metronome 

  1. Flexprice

  2. Orb

  3. Amberflo

  4. Lago

  5. Stripe Billing

Tool

Best For

Key Features

Limitations

Flexprice

AI-native, usage-heavy SaaS teams that need pricing agility, credits, contracts, and unified billing

  • Real-time usage metering (API calls, tokens, compute)

  • First-class credit & wallet system (expiry, rollover, top-ups)

  • Hybrid pricing (subscription + usage + credits)

  • Ramped contracts & customer-specific overrides

  • Parent–child accounts & pooled usage

  • Built-in invoicing & multi-currency support

  • Open-source and API-first

Newer ecosystem compared to  long-established vendors


Orb

SaaS & AI teams with relatively simple usage billing who want a clean UI

  • Metering + billing + native invoicing

  • Revenue recognition support (ASC 606)

  • Pricing experimentation UI

  • CRM & finance tool integrations

  • Limited customization for complex billing logic

  • Not ideal for highly bespoke AI pricing models

Amberflo

Teams prioritizing high-scale, real-time usage metering and cost visibility

  • Real-time event ingestion at massive scale

  • Usage analytics & cost attribution (FinOps-style)

  • Flexible usage-based pricing models

  • Cloud-native architecture

  • Billing workflows can require custom work

  • Smaller ecosystem & fewer shared best practices

Lago

Teams that want open-source billing with control and are willing to build

  • Open-source & self-hostable

  • Usage-based pricing + subscriptions

  • Built-in invoicing

  • Flexible pricing models

  • Requires dedicated engineering & maintenance

  • Advanced finance workflows need custom development

Stripe Billing

Stripe-first teams with simple subscription or per-unit pricing

  • Subscription & per-unit usage pricing

  • Native invoicing & dunning

  • Strong security & global payments

  • Tight Stripe Payments integration

  • Credits are not first-class wallets

  • Limited pricing agility for complex usage models

  • High vendor lock-in

  1. Flexprice

If you are looking for a credible Metronome alternative for billing that is open-source and developer-friendly, Flexprice is your best choice. . 

While Metronome focuses heavily on enterprise contract modeling inside a managed ecosystem, Flexprice takes a fundamentally different approach: monetization as infrastructure, not just billing configuration.

Flexprice lets teams define granular, real-time usage metering for anything API calls, tokens, compute seconds, feature usage, using an event-driven architecture designed to handle high-volume streams reliably. 

Pricing logic lives outside your core application, so teams can iterate on usage-based, credit-based, hybrid, or outcome-based pricing without rewriting backend code or coupling to a single vendor’s stack.

A key differentiator is Flexprice’s credit-native architecture. Companies can issue free or paid credits, enforce expiry rules, track burn rates, trigger low-balance alerts, and block usage automatically when limits are hit. 

This makes Flexprice especially well-suited for AI and agentic products where cost control, margins, and real-time enforcement matter as much as billing accuracy.

Flexprice also treats feature access and entitlements as a first-class part of monetization, not an afterthought. Teams can gate features using metered, boolean, or static entitlements that stay in sync with usage, plans, and credits, making it easier to ship, experiment, and monetize product capabilities together.

Unlike Metronome’s managed, Stripe-aligned future, Flexprice is open-source and self-hostable, giving teams full control over their billing stack, data, and infrastructure decisions. 

This is particularly important for companies that want to remain PSP-agnostic, avoid long-term platform lock-in, or operate under stricter compliance and data residency requirements.

Key Features

  • Self-hosted or cloud: Flexprice is an open-source platform which gives you the flexibility to self-host or cloud-host so that you can run your billing infrastructure that suits best for your product. Either way, you get developer support from the community for smoother integrations.

  • Real-time usage metering: Track API calls, GPU hours, tokens at a granular level with low latency and handle high‑volume event streams at a rate of 20B+ events per month without breaking a sweat.

  • Customer Dashboard API: Give customers and internal teams real‑time visibility into consumption and charges via embedded dashboards.

  • Event ingestion with built-in aggregation: Ingest and aggregate usage using pre‑built rules like sum, count, unique counts without extra engineering or custom pipelines.

  • AI Cost sheet: It supports cost attribution down to each customer, feature, and workload, so you can price profitably and optimize resource usage.

  • SOC 2‑aligned security: It is built with SOC 2 aligned practices so that you can meet enterprise security and compliance expectations.

  • Ramped Contracts: You can configure contracts with prices that change over time without writing custom code for each enterprise deal.

  • Parent-Child Accounts: It supports account hierarchies; multiple child workspaces or teams roll up into a single parent billing profile with shared credits and usage.

  • Feature management & entitlements: Controls customer access to features, sets usage limits, and enables upsell opportunities through plan customization.

  • Flexibility to run pricing models: Run subscription‑only, usage‑based, hybrid, or credit‑based pricing and experiment with customer‑specific plans without rebuilding the stack. Pricing iterations can be done in less than 30 minutes while many companies take weeks for the same.

  • Advanced pricing logic: You can implement volume tiers, package deals, and overage charges to optimize monetization across diverse customers.

  • Credit/wallet management system: You can manage prepaid credits, auto top-ups, promotions, and credit expiry policies for predictable cash flow.

  • Automated invoicing & billing: Generate unified invoices combining subscriptions, usage, and credit adjustments automatically with Flexprice. 

  • Plan versioning & overrides: Flexprice enables price updates per customer or cohort without migrations, accelerating experimentation and launches.

  • Low engineering integration: Provides developer-first APIs, SDKs, and webhooks for easy, fast integration into existing infrastructure.

  • Payment Gateway integration: Flexprice integrates with Stripe, Razorpay and many other payment processors so that you can connect metered billing and invoicing to your existing payment flows.

  • Multi currency support: Flexprice helps you localize pricing and charge different rates across regions and currencies for global customers.

  • Active Slack community: You get hands-on support from an active, dedicated developer community during integration and implementation of the stack with your existing systems. 

Who is it best for?

Teams building AI-native or usage-heavy products that need real-time metering, credit-based monetization, feature-level control, and long-term flexibility especially those looking for a strong alternative to Metronome after its acquisition and deeper alignment with Stripe.

Metronome was built for a world where the core challenge was turning raw usage into billable metrics. For that, it’s excellent.

But today, the game has changed, pricing is no longer just about usage; it’s about credits, wallets, , faster experimentation and so much more.

Especially, with the recent Metronome acquisition by Stripe, makes it much harder for new AI companies, because even though we love Metronome as a product, it’s not wise to pick a tool that gets you locked in the Stripe’s ecosystem and roadmap. That’s where it stops being a complete billing solution and  you need to look for Metronome alternatives. 

The right Metronome alternative should scale from simple subscriptions to complex usage‑based models, support both developer and finance workflows, and integrate smoothly with your stack like Flexprice does. 

For teams that want more pricing agility, better finance control, and a smoother customer experience, here are the top 5 billing platforms that can be great Metronome alternatives.

Note: Even though this post is published on Flexprice, it’s not a biased roundup. We’ve evaluated every tool on its technical merit, flexibility, and developer experience exactly how we’d expect anyone building serious AI infrastructure to do.

TL;DR

  • Metronome is great at metering, but weak at full billing.

  • Modern AI & SaaS pricing needs more than usage to invoice.Teams need pricing agility, real-time visibility, experimentation, and unified invoices without constant engineering work.

  • Top Metronome alternatives to consider: Flexprice: Best overall alternative for AI & usage-heavy SaaS; Open-source, real-time metering, credits & wallets, ramped contracts, parent-child accounts, fast pricing experiments, strong finance visibility

  • Orb: Clean UI, simple use cases; Amberflo: Strong metering; Lago: Open-source, flexible starting point; Stripe Billing: Reliable for simple subscriptions

  • If you only need metering to billing: Metronome, Orb, or Amberflo can work.

  • If you need pricing agility + finance control + experimentation: Flexprice stands out.

  • Bottom line:Metronome solves usage measurement.

  • Flexprice solves modern monetization: pricing, credits, contracts, invoices, and experimentation in one system.

What is Metronome? 

Metronome is a usage‑based billing platform built to turn raw usage events like API calls, tokens, compute minutes, or inference requests into accurate, auditable bills for SaaS and AI products.

It works well for teams that need granular metering of events and simple usage‑based pricing. 

Metronome was built for a time when the primary problem was usage metering. But modern SaaS and AI products don’t just need metering,  they need full billing, pricing agility, and finance workflows.

When Metronome Starts to Break

1. It’s a metering layer, not a full billing platform

Metronome is excellent at turning events into billable metrics, but it’s not a complete billing system.

It doesn’t handle complex subscription lifecycles like mid‑cycle upgrades, proration, cancellations; multi‑product, multi‑plan contracts with mixed pricing models and unified invoices that combine subscriptions, usage, and credits. 

2. Pricing is not truly agile

Modern teams need to run pricing experiments, change usage logic frequently as products evolve and support customer‑specific plans and enterprise deals. 

With Metronome, every pricing change often requires updating rate cards, modifying event schemas, re‑processing historical data or building workarounds. This makes pricing slow, risky, and tightly coupled to engineering.

3. Credits and wallets are not first‑class

Metronome focuses on usage, not credits. It does not support per‑account credit wallets, auto top‑ups and promotions, credit expiry and rollover policies. 

If your pricing model relies on credits like prepaid credits, usage allowances, or credit‑based access, you end up building that layer yourself on top of Metronome, adding complexity and maintenance overhead.

4. Finance and RevOps workflows are limited

Metronome lacks real‑time dashboards for customers and internal teams, detailed reporting and forecasting tools and compliant revenue recognition and audit trails.

Finance teams are left waiting for invoices or exports to understand revenue impact, making it hard to forecast accurately, reconcile usage vs. billing and answer customer questions about consumption and charges.

6. Stripe acquisition changes priorities and flexibility

Since Metronome’s acquisition by Stripe, its roadmap and integrations are increasingly aligned with Stripe’s broader ecosystem. While this strengthens its fit for Stripe-centric stacks, it also means less flexibility for teams using other payment gateways or wanting to avoid vendor lock-in. Custom workflows, multi-gateway support, and independent billing logic become harder to maintain, pushing teams toward a more opinionated, Stripe-first architecture rather than a neutral, open billing foundation.

With Metronome, you will suffer with your pricing iterations, multi-currency billing and lose control over your billing logic. It is heavily developer dependent with limited forecasting modules and lacks detailed reporting tools for your customer’s visibility. 

Top 5 Usage Based Billing Alternatives to Metronome 

  1. Flexprice

  2. Orb

  3. Amberflo

  4. Lago

  5. Stripe Billing

Tool

Best For

Key Features

Limitations

Flexprice

AI-native, usage-heavy SaaS teams that need pricing agility, credits, contracts, and unified billing

  • Real-time usage metering (API calls, tokens, compute)

  • First-class credit & wallet system (expiry, rollover, top-ups)

  • Hybrid pricing (subscription + usage + credits)

  • Ramped contracts & customer-specific overrides

  • Parent–child accounts & pooled usage

  • Built-in invoicing & multi-currency support

  • Open-source and API-first

Newer ecosystem compared to  long-established vendors


Orb

SaaS & AI teams with relatively simple usage billing who want a clean UI

  • Metering + billing + native invoicing

  • Revenue recognition support (ASC 606)

  • Pricing experimentation UI

  • CRM & finance tool integrations

  • Limited customization for complex billing logic

  • Not ideal for highly bespoke AI pricing models

Amberflo

Teams prioritizing high-scale, real-time usage metering and cost visibility

  • Real-time event ingestion at massive scale

  • Usage analytics & cost attribution (FinOps-style)

  • Flexible usage-based pricing models

  • Cloud-native architecture

  • Billing workflows can require custom work

  • Smaller ecosystem & fewer shared best practices

Lago

Teams that want open-source billing with control and are willing to build

  • Open-source & self-hostable

  • Usage-based pricing + subscriptions

  • Built-in invoicing

  • Flexible pricing models

  • Requires dedicated engineering & maintenance

  • Advanced finance workflows need custom development

Stripe Billing

Stripe-first teams with simple subscription or per-unit pricing

  • Subscription & per-unit usage pricing

  • Native invoicing & dunning

  • Strong security & global payments

  • Tight Stripe Payments integration

  • Credits are not first-class wallets

  • Limited pricing agility for complex usage models

  • High vendor lock-in

  1. Flexprice

If you are looking for a credible Metronome alternative for billing that is open-source and developer-friendly, Flexprice is your best choice. . 

While Metronome focuses heavily on enterprise contract modeling inside a managed ecosystem, Flexprice takes a fundamentally different approach: monetization as infrastructure, not just billing configuration.

Flexprice lets teams define granular, real-time usage metering for anything API calls, tokens, compute seconds, feature usage, using an event-driven architecture designed to handle high-volume streams reliably. 

Pricing logic lives outside your core application, so teams can iterate on usage-based, credit-based, hybrid, or outcome-based pricing without rewriting backend code or coupling to a single vendor’s stack.

A key differentiator is Flexprice’s credit-native architecture. Companies can issue free or paid credits, enforce expiry rules, track burn rates, trigger low-balance alerts, and block usage automatically when limits are hit. 

This makes Flexprice especially well-suited for AI and agentic products where cost control, margins, and real-time enforcement matter as much as billing accuracy.

Flexprice also treats feature access and entitlements as a first-class part of monetization, not an afterthought. Teams can gate features using metered, boolean, or static entitlements that stay in sync with usage, plans, and credits, making it easier to ship, experiment, and monetize product capabilities together.

Unlike Metronome’s managed, Stripe-aligned future, Flexprice is open-source and self-hostable, giving teams full control over their billing stack, data, and infrastructure decisions. 

This is particularly important for companies that want to remain PSP-agnostic, avoid long-term platform lock-in, or operate under stricter compliance and data residency requirements.

Key Features

  • Self-hosted or cloud: Flexprice is an open-source platform which gives you the flexibility to self-host or cloud-host so that you can run your billing infrastructure that suits best for your product. Either way, you get developer support from the community for smoother integrations.

  • Real-time usage metering: Track API calls, GPU hours, tokens at a granular level with low latency and handle high‑volume event streams at a rate of 20B+ events per month without breaking a sweat.

  • Customer Dashboard API: Give customers and internal teams real‑time visibility into consumption and charges via embedded dashboards.

  • Event ingestion with built-in aggregation: Ingest and aggregate usage using pre‑built rules like sum, count, unique counts without extra engineering or custom pipelines.

  • AI Cost sheet: It supports cost attribution down to each customer, feature, and workload, so you can price profitably and optimize resource usage.

  • SOC 2‑aligned security: It is built with SOC 2 aligned practices so that you can meet enterprise security and compliance expectations.

  • Ramped Contracts: You can configure contracts with prices that change over time without writing custom code for each enterprise deal.

  • Parent-Child Accounts: It supports account hierarchies; multiple child workspaces or teams roll up into a single parent billing profile with shared credits and usage.

  • Feature management & entitlements: Controls customer access to features, sets usage limits, and enables upsell opportunities through plan customization.

  • Flexibility to run pricing models: Run subscription‑only, usage‑based, hybrid, or credit‑based pricing and experiment with customer‑specific plans without rebuilding the stack. Pricing iterations can be done in less than 30 minutes while many companies take weeks for the same.

  • Advanced pricing logic: You can implement volume tiers, package deals, and overage charges to optimize monetization across diverse customers.

  • Credit/wallet management system: You can manage prepaid credits, auto top-ups, promotions, and credit expiry policies for predictable cash flow.

  • Automated invoicing & billing: Generate unified invoices combining subscriptions, usage, and credit adjustments automatically with Flexprice. 

  • Plan versioning & overrides: Flexprice enables price updates per customer or cohort without migrations, accelerating experimentation and launches.

  • Low engineering integration: Provides developer-first APIs, SDKs, and webhooks for easy, fast integration into existing infrastructure.

  • Payment Gateway integration: Flexprice integrates with Stripe, Razorpay and many other payment processors so that you can connect metered billing and invoicing to your existing payment flows.

  • Multi currency support: Flexprice helps you localize pricing and charge different rates across regions and currencies for global customers.

  • Active Slack community: You get hands-on support from an active, dedicated developer community during integration and implementation of the stack with your existing systems. 

Who is it best for?

Teams building AI-native or usage-heavy products that need real-time metering, credit-based monetization, feature-level control, and long-term flexibility especially those looking for a strong alternative to Metronome after its acquisition and deeper alignment with Stripe.

Metronome was built for a world where the core challenge was turning raw usage into billable metrics. For that, it’s excellent.

But today, the game has changed, pricing is no longer just about usage; it’s about credits, wallets, , faster experimentation and so much more.

Especially, with the recent Metronome acquisition by Stripe, makes it much harder for new AI companies, because even though we love Metronome as a product, it’s not wise to pick a tool that gets you locked in the Stripe’s ecosystem and roadmap. That’s where it stops being a complete billing solution and  you need to look for Metronome alternatives. 

The right Metronome alternative should scale from simple subscriptions to complex usage‑based models, support both developer and finance workflows, and integrate smoothly with your stack like Flexprice does. 

For teams that want more pricing agility, better finance control, and a smoother customer experience, here are the top 5 billing platforms that can be great Metronome alternatives.

Note: Even though this post is published on Flexprice, it’s not a biased roundup. We’ve evaluated every tool on its technical merit, flexibility, and developer experience exactly how we’d expect anyone building serious AI infrastructure to do.

TL;DR

  • Metronome is great at metering, but weak at full billing.

  • Modern AI & SaaS pricing needs more than usage to invoice.Teams need pricing agility, real-time visibility, experimentation, and unified invoices without constant engineering work.

  • Top Metronome alternatives to consider: Flexprice: Best overall alternative for AI & usage-heavy SaaS; Open-source, real-time metering, credits & wallets, ramped contracts, parent-child accounts, fast pricing experiments, strong finance visibility

  • Orb: Clean UI, simple use cases; Amberflo: Strong metering; Lago: Open-source, flexible starting point; Stripe Billing: Reliable for simple subscriptions

  • If you only need metering to billing: Metronome, Orb, or Amberflo can work.

  • If you need pricing agility + finance control + experimentation: Flexprice stands out.

  • Bottom line:Metronome solves usage measurement.

  • Flexprice solves modern monetization: pricing, credits, contracts, invoices, and experimentation in one system.

What is Metronome? 

Metronome is a usage‑based billing platform built to turn raw usage events like API calls, tokens, compute minutes, or inference requests into accurate, auditable bills for SaaS and AI products.

It works well for teams that need granular metering of events and simple usage‑based pricing. 

Metronome was built for a time when the primary problem was usage metering. But modern SaaS and AI products don’t just need metering,  they need full billing, pricing agility, and finance workflows.

When Metronome Starts to Break

1. It’s a metering layer, not a full billing platform

Metronome is excellent at turning events into billable metrics, but it’s not a complete billing system.

It doesn’t handle complex subscription lifecycles like mid‑cycle upgrades, proration, cancellations; multi‑product, multi‑plan contracts with mixed pricing models and unified invoices that combine subscriptions, usage, and credits. 

2. Pricing is not truly agile

Modern teams need to run pricing experiments, change usage logic frequently as products evolve and support customer‑specific plans and enterprise deals. 

With Metronome, every pricing change often requires updating rate cards, modifying event schemas, re‑processing historical data or building workarounds. This makes pricing slow, risky, and tightly coupled to engineering.

3. Credits and wallets are not first‑class

Metronome focuses on usage, not credits. It does not support per‑account credit wallets, auto top‑ups and promotions, credit expiry and rollover policies. 

If your pricing model relies on credits like prepaid credits, usage allowances, or credit‑based access, you end up building that layer yourself on top of Metronome, adding complexity and maintenance overhead.

4. Finance and RevOps workflows are limited

Metronome lacks real‑time dashboards for customers and internal teams, detailed reporting and forecasting tools and compliant revenue recognition and audit trails.

Finance teams are left waiting for invoices or exports to understand revenue impact, making it hard to forecast accurately, reconcile usage vs. billing and answer customer questions about consumption and charges.

6. Stripe acquisition changes priorities and flexibility

Since Metronome’s acquisition by Stripe, its roadmap and integrations are increasingly aligned with Stripe’s broader ecosystem. While this strengthens its fit for Stripe-centric stacks, it also means less flexibility for teams using other payment gateways or wanting to avoid vendor lock-in. Custom workflows, multi-gateway support, and independent billing logic become harder to maintain, pushing teams toward a more opinionated, Stripe-first architecture rather than a neutral, open billing foundation.

With Metronome, you will suffer with your pricing iterations, multi-currency billing and lose control over your billing logic. It is heavily developer dependent with limited forecasting modules and lacks detailed reporting tools for your customer’s visibility. 

Top 5 Usage Based Billing Alternatives to Metronome 

  1. Flexprice

  2. Orb

  3. Amberflo

  4. Lago

  5. Stripe Billing

Tool

Best For

Key Features

Limitations

Flexprice

AI-native, usage-heavy SaaS teams that need pricing agility, credits, contracts, and unified billing

  • Real-time usage metering (API calls, tokens, compute)

  • First-class credit & wallet system (expiry, rollover, top-ups)

  • Hybrid pricing (subscription + usage + credits)

  • Ramped contracts & customer-specific overrides

  • Parent–child accounts & pooled usage

  • Built-in invoicing & multi-currency support

  • Open-source and API-first

Newer ecosystem compared to  long-established vendors


Orb

SaaS & AI teams with relatively simple usage billing who want a clean UI

  • Metering + billing + native invoicing

  • Revenue recognition support (ASC 606)

  • Pricing experimentation UI

  • CRM & finance tool integrations

  • Limited customization for complex billing logic

  • Not ideal for highly bespoke AI pricing models

Amberflo

Teams prioritizing high-scale, real-time usage metering and cost visibility

  • Real-time event ingestion at massive scale

  • Usage analytics & cost attribution (FinOps-style)

  • Flexible usage-based pricing models

  • Cloud-native architecture

  • Billing workflows can require custom work

  • Smaller ecosystem & fewer shared best practices

Lago

Teams that want open-source billing with control and are willing to build

  • Open-source & self-hostable

  • Usage-based pricing + subscriptions

  • Built-in invoicing

  • Flexible pricing models

  • Requires dedicated engineering & maintenance

  • Advanced finance workflows need custom development

Stripe Billing

Stripe-first teams with simple subscription or per-unit pricing

  • Subscription & per-unit usage pricing

  • Native invoicing & dunning

  • Strong security & global payments

  • Tight Stripe Payments integration

  • Credits are not first-class wallets

  • Limited pricing agility for complex usage models

  • High vendor lock-in

  1. Flexprice

If you are looking for a credible Metronome alternative for billing that is open-source and developer-friendly, Flexprice is your best choice. . 

While Metronome focuses heavily on enterprise contract modeling inside a managed ecosystem, Flexprice takes a fundamentally different approach: monetization as infrastructure, not just billing configuration.

Flexprice lets teams define granular, real-time usage metering for anything API calls, tokens, compute seconds, feature usage, using an event-driven architecture designed to handle high-volume streams reliably. 

Pricing logic lives outside your core application, so teams can iterate on usage-based, credit-based, hybrid, or outcome-based pricing without rewriting backend code or coupling to a single vendor’s stack.

A key differentiator is Flexprice’s credit-native architecture. Companies can issue free or paid credits, enforce expiry rules, track burn rates, trigger low-balance alerts, and block usage automatically when limits are hit. 

This makes Flexprice especially well-suited for AI and agentic products where cost control, margins, and real-time enforcement matter as much as billing accuracy.

Flexprice also treats feature access and entitlements as a first-class part of monetization, not an afterthought. Teams can gate features using metered, boolean, or static entitlements that stay in sync with usage, plans, and credits, making it easier to ship, experiment, and monetize product capabilities together.

Unlike Metronome’s managed, Stripe-aligned future, Flexprice is open-source and self-hostable, giving teams full control over their billing stack, data, and infrastructure decisions. 

This is particularly important for companies that want to remain PSP-agnostic, avoid long-term platform lock-in, or operate under stricter compliance and data residency requirements.

Key Features

  • Self-hosted or cloud: Flexprice is an open-source platform which gives you the flexibility to self-host or cloud-host so that you can run your billing infrastructure that suits best for your product. Either way, you get developer support from the community for smoother integrations.

  • Real-time usage metering: Track API calls, GPU hours, tokens at a granular level with low latency and handle high‑volume event streams at a rate of 20B+ events per month without breaking a sweat.

  • Customer Dashboard API: Give customers and internal teams real‑time visibility into consumption and charges via embedded dashboards.

  • Event ingestion with built-in aggregation: Ingest and aggregate usage using pre‑built rules like sum, count, unique counts without extra engineering or custom pipelines.

  • AI Cost sheet: It supports cost attribution down to each customer, feature, and workload, so you can price profitably and optimize resource usage.

  • SOC 2‑aligned security: It is built with SOC 2 aligned practices so that you can meet enterprise security and compliance expectations.

  • Ramped Contracts: You can configure contracts with prices that change over time without writing custom code for each enterprise deal.

  • Parent-Child Accounts: It supports account hierarchies; multiple child workspaces or teams roll up into a single parent billing profile with shared credits and usage.

  • Feature management & entitlements: Controls customer access to features, sets usage limits, and enables upsell opportunities through plan customization.

  • Flexibility to run pricing models: Run subscription‑only, usage‑based, hybrid, or credit‑based pricing and experiment with customer‑specific plans without rebuilding the stack. Pricing iterations can be done in less than 30 minutes while many companies take weeks for the same.

  • Advanced pricing logic: You can implement volume tiers, package deals, and overage charges to optimize monetization across diverse customers.

  • Credit/wallet management system: You can manage prepaid credits, auto top-ups, promotions, and credit expiry policies for predictable cash flow.

  • Automated invoicing & billing: Generate unified invoices combining subscriptions, usage, and credit adjustments automatically with Flexprice. 

  • Plan versioning & overrides: Flexprice enables price updates per customer or cohort without migrations, accelerating experimentation and launches.

  • Low engineering integration: Provides developer-first APIs, SDKs, and webhooks for easy, fast integration into existing infrastructure.

  • Payment Gateway integration: Flexprice integrates with Stripe, Razorpay and many other payment processors so that you can connect metered billing and invoicing to your existing payment flows.

  • Multi currency support: Flexprice helps you localize pricing and charge different rates across regions and currencies for global customers.

  • Active Slack community: You get hands-on support from an active, dedicated developer community during integration and implementation of the stack with your existing systems. 

Who is it best for?

Teams building AI-native or usage-heavy products that need real-time metering, credit-based monetization, feature-level control, and long-term flexibility especially those looking for a strong alternative to Metronome after its acquisition and deeper alignment with Stripe.

Get started with your billing today.

Get started with your billing today.

Get started with your billing today.

  1. Orb

Orb is a user-friendly billing and revenue platform for SaaS and AI companies. It is a great choice as a Metronome alternative for businesses with simple and straightforward billing needs.

While Metronome is primarily built for metering purposes, Orb includes metering, billing, native invoicing, reporting, and pricing experimentation tools.

Key Features

  • User-friendly dashboard: Orb provides dashboards so that teams can look at pricing and track usage and review invoices without much engineering intervention.

  • Workflow and tool integrations: It can be integrated with your CRMs, payment processors, and accounting tools so that teams have everything connected and in one place.

  • Metering and billing: Orb provides great metering and billing layers so that you don’t lose out on your potential revenue. 

  • Revenue recognition: It is ASC606-compliant and automates revenue recognition reporting down to the customer or event level.

  • Flexible pricing: You can test various pricing strategies with pricing models like usage, tiered, and hybrid models. 

That being said, Orb provides limited customization options and may not scale well with your product. It gets difficult for you with your complex billing needs.

Who is it best for?

SaaS and AI companies that are looking for simple usage tracking and billing; teams that are not really looking for agency and want their basic billing needs to be fulfilled.

  1. Amberflo

Amberflo is a cloud-based billing platform with great metering capabilities that turns usage into auditable bills along with accurate invoicing. 

It is a good option as a Metronome alternative particularly for companies needing massive scale, real-time usage metering, and deep analytics, often excelling where Metronome might hit throughput limits or offer less flexibility. 

Key Features

  • Real-time metering: It can ingest and track high volumes of events 

  • Flexible pricing: Your teams can model flat based, usage-based and hybrid pricing models

  • Cost tracking and FinOps: It provides dashboards for cost attribution for each compute unit to customers and teams to improve margins and prevent revenue loss.

  • Analytics and reporting: It supports in-depth analytics and data visibility for better decision making

  • Integration: It integrates well with your existing CRM and payment gateways for seamless experience. 

Amberflo still has a long way to go when it comes to customization and your teams will probably struggle with complex pricing and billing 

Who is it best for?

AI and SaaS companies that are operating in limited geographies and not looking at much customization and niche needs. 

  1. Lago

Lago is an open-source billing platform that is good for usage-based metering and billing along with subscription management and invoices as well. 

Lago can be considered a good Metronome alternative because of its open source nature, built-in invoicing and control that you get over your billing. 

It handles complex pricing models and integrates with various payment gateways for seamless billing and invoicing. Legacy tools like Metronome often stop at metering. 

Key Features

  • Open-source: Lago can be self-hosted and cloud-hosted for maximum flexibility

  • Real-time usage tracking: You can track all the events in real-time for accurate billing

  • Flexible pricing: You get the flexibility to go with various pricing models to see what fits the best 

  • High-volume event ingestion: Lago can handle high-volumes of events from metering to billing

To deploy Lago, you need a dedicated engineering team and extra resources to self-host and to maintain the platform regularly. 

Who is it best for?

It is best suited for companies that have just started and have extra engineering bandwidth to add custom codes for advanced billing and finance features. 

  1. Stripe Billing 

Stripe Billing is a programmable billing platform that enables flexible pricing models and works across multiple currencies. It helps centralize revenue operations, reducing reliance on custom scripts and manual calculations.

Stripe’s acquisition of Metronome brings advanced usage‑based billing capabilities directly into the Stripe platform, turning it into a powerful, all‑in‑one solution that now competes with and effectively absorbs Metronome’s standalone functionality for modern SaaS and API businesses.

Key features

  • Flexible pricing models: Stripe supports tiered, usage‑based, and hybrid pricing, so you can easily match your billing to how customers actually use your product.

  • Real‑time usage tracking: You can capture and track usage events as they happen, ensuring accurate, up‑to‑date billing without delays.

  • Security & compliance: Built with PCI DSS Level 1, SOC, and ISO 27001 certifications, so your data and customer payments stay secure and compliant.

  • Global payment processing: Run multi‑currency billing seamlessly, letting customers pay in their local currency and expanding your reach worldwide.

Stripe works well for flat, seat-based plans and you get vendor-locked with a rigid credit system and limited visibility and transparency. Now that it has acquired Metronome, it is quite complex to adopt without a single data model or support for complex billing requirements.

Who is it best for?

Stripe Billing is the best option for teams that are looking at basic subscription plans and billing features. 

Flexprice: The Ultimate Metronome Alternative

If you are using Metronome, you probably know that you have got a solid event pipeline and a system that turns these raw events into billable metrics but that is where the super power ends.

Your finance cannot see the real-time impact of a pricing change until the invoice lands, every new tier, discount, or mid-cycle upgrade needs a code change and a migration, your customers get complex and confusing invoices, and when you want to experiment with credit-based pricing, ramped contracts, or parent-child accounts, you’re back to square one with custom scripts that feel like patchwork.

This is when Flexprice steps up. You can ingest high-volume event streams 20bn events a month via Kafka, gRPC, or REST, with built-in aggregation. Flexprice supports granular usage tracking with low-latency, high-accuracy metering. You can also test various pricing models (subscription, usage, hybrid, credit-based) with volume tiers, packages, overage, and customer-specific overrides; and deploy a new pricing model in days. 

With Flexprice, your billing is unified with clear invoices that combine subscriptions, usage, and credit adjustments, with multi-currency, tax, and global invoicing. 

Head over to Flexprice’s docs to see how it works under the hood, from event ingestion and metering to pricing, credits, and invoicing, all in one place.

FAQs

  1. Is Metronome a billing platform or a metering layer?

Metronome is primarily a metering and usage rating layer, not a full billing platform.

It does not natively handle:

  • Full subscription lifecycle management

  • Credits, wallets, or auto top-ups

  • Unified invoices (subscription + usage + credits)

  • Customer-facing real-time dashboards

  • Pricing experiments without engineering changes

This is why teams often pair it with other systems or eventually replace it.

  1. Why is pricing agility so hard with Metronome?

Metronome is built for stable usage models, not rapid experimentation. Common pain points:

  • Every new tier, discount, or customer‑specific plan often requires changes to rate cards and event schemas.

  • Mid‑cycle upgrades and proration aren’t native; you end up with custom logic and workarounds.

  • Historical data may need re‑processing or backfilling when pricing changes.

  • Finance can’t see the impact of a pricing change until the invoice is generated.

Modern platforms like Flexprice solve this by making pricing logic config‑driven, versioned, and decoupled from core code.

  1. How do credits and wallets work in Flexprice vs. Metronome?

Metronome:

Credits are not a first‑class concept. You can do invoice adjustments or promotional offsets, but you can’t easily:

  • Track real‑time credit balances per customer.

  • Tie credits to specific features or entitlements.

  • Use credits to control access or enforce limits.

Flexprice:

  • Credits are a core abstraction:

  • Persistent, per‑account credit wallets with auto top‑ups and promotions.

  • Credit expiry, rollover, and usage limits.

  • Feature entitlements and access control tied to credit balances.

  1. Can I keep using Metronome for metering and pair it with another billing system?

Yes, but it comes with trade‑offs:

  • You’ll have two systems (Metronome + Stripe/Chargebee/etc.) with different data models and APIs.

  • Invoicing, proration, and subscription logic live in the billing system, while usage logic lives in Metronome.

This creates a fragile pipeline: if Metronome and the billing system disagree on usage, it’s hard to debug and reconcile.

Flexprice avoids this by combining metering, pricing, and billing in one platform, so there’s only one source of truth.

  1. Is Flexprice only for AI and usage‑heavy SaaS?

Flexprice is optimized for AI, API, and usage‑heavy SaaS, but it works for any product that needs:

  • Granular usage metering (API calls, tokens, compute, etc.).

  • Flexible pricing (subscription, usage, hybrid, credit‑based).

  • Complex contracts (ramped, parent‑child, enterprise deals).

If your product is moving beyond simple seat‑based pricing and into usage‑based, credit‑based, or outcome‑based models, Flexprice is a strong fit.

  1. Orb

Orb is a user-friendly billing and revenue platform for SaaS and AI companies. It is a great choice as a Metronome alternative for businesses with simple and straightforward billing needs.

While Metronome is primarily built for metering purposes, Orb includes metering, billing, native invoicing, reporting, and pricing experimentation tools.

Key Features

  • User-friendly dashboard: Orb provides dashboards so that teams can look at pricing and track usage and review invoices without much engineering intervention.

  • Workflow and tool integrations: It can be integrated with your CRMs, payment processors, and accounting tools so that teams have everything connected and in one place.

  • Metering and billing: Orb provides great metering and billing layers so that you don’t lose out on your potential revenue. 

  • Revenue recognition: It is ASC606-compliant and automates revenue recognition reporting down to the customer or event level.

  • Flexible pricing: You can test various pricing strategies with pricing models like usage, tiered, and hybrid models. 

That being said, Orb provides limited customization options and may not scale well with your product. It gets difficult for you with your complex billing needs.

Who is it best for?

SaaS and AI companies that are looking for simple usage tracking and billing; teams that are not really looking for agency and want their basic billing needs to be fulfilled.

  1. Amberflo

Amberflo is a cloud-based billing platform with great metering capabilities that turns usage into auditable bills along with accurate invoicing. 

It is a good option as a Metronome alternative particularly for companies needing massive scale, real-time usage metering, and deep analytics, often excelling where Metronome might hit throughput limits or offer less flexibility. 

Key Features

  • Real-time metering: It can ingest and track high volumes of events 

  • Flexible pricing: Your teams can model flat based, usage-based and hybrid pricing models

  • Cost tracking and FinOps: It provides dashboards for cost attribution for each compute unit to customers and teams to improve margins and prevent revenue loss.

  • Analytics and reporting: It supports in-depth analytics and data visibility for better decision making

  • Integration: It integrates well with your existing CRM and payment gateways for seamless experience. 

Amberflo still has a long way to go when it comes to customization and your teams will probably struggle with complex pricing and billing 

Who is it best for?

AI and SaaS companies that are operating in limited geographies and not looking at much customization and niche needs. 

  1. Lago

Lago is an open-source billing platform that is good for usage-based metering and billing along with subscription management and invoices as well. 

Lago can be considered a good Metronome alternative because of its open source nature, built-in invoicing and control that you get over your billing. 

It handles complex pricing models and integrates with various payment gateways for seamless billing and invoicing. Legacy tools like Metronome often stop at metering. 

Key Features

  • Open-source: Lago can be self-hosted and cloud-hosted for maximum flexibility

  • Real-time usage tracking: You can track all the events in real-time for accurate billing

  • Flexible pricing: You get the flexibility to go with various pricing models to see what fits the best 

  • High-volume event ingestion: Lago can handle high-volumes of events from metering to billing

To deploy Lago, you need a dedicated engineering team and extra resources to self-host and to maintain the platform regularly. 

Who is it best for?

It is best suited for companies that have just started and have extra engineering bandwidth to add custom codes for advanced billing and finance features. 

  1. Stripe Billing 

Stripe Billing is a programmable billing platform that enables flexible pricing models and works across multiple currencies. It helps centralize revenue operations, reducing reliance on custom scripts and manual calculations.

Stripe’s acquisition of Metronome brings advanced usage‑based billing capabilities directly into the Stripe platform, turning it into a powerful, all‑in‑one solution that now competes with and effectively absorbs Metronome’s standalone functionality for modern SaaS and API businesses.

Key features

  • Flexible pricing models: Stripe supports tiered, usage‑based, and hybrid pricing, so you can easily match your billing to how customers actually use your product.

  • Real‑time usage tracking: You can capture and track usage events as they happen, ensuring accurate, up‑to‑date billing without delays.

  • Security & compliance: Built with PCI DSS Level 1, SOC, and ISO 27001 certifications, so your data and customer payments stay secure and compliant.

  • Global payment processing: Run multi‑currency billing seamlessly, letting customers pay in their local currency and expanding your reach worldwide.

Stripe works well for flat, seat-based plans and you get vendor-locked with a rigid credit system and limited visibility and transparency. Now that it has acquired Metronome, it is quite complex to adopt without a single data model or support for complex billing requirements.

Who is it best for?

Stripe Billing is the best option for teams that are looking at basic subscription plans and billing features. 

Flexprice: The Ultimate Metronome Alternative

If you are using Metronome, you probably know that you have got a solid event pipeline and a system that turns these raw events into billable metrics but that is where the super power ends.

Your finance cannot see the real-time impact of a pricing change until the invoice lands, every new tier, discount, or mid-cycle upgrade needs a code change and a migration, your customers get complex and confusing invoices, and when you want to experiment with credit-based pricing, ramped contracts, or parent-child accounts, you’re back to square one with custom scripts that feel like patchwork.

This is when Flexprice steps up. You can ingest high-volume event streams 20bn events a month via Kafka, gRPC, or REST, with built-in aggregation. Flexprice supports granular usage tracking with low-latency, high-accuracy metering. You can also test various pricing models (subscription, usage, hybrid, credit-based) with volume tiers, packages, overage, and customer-specific overrides; and deploy a new pricing model in days. 

With Flexprice, your billing is unified with clear invoices that combine subscriptions, usage, and credit adjustments, with multi-currency, tax, and global invoicing. 

Head over to Flexprice’s docs to see how it works under the hood, from event ingestion and metering to pricing, credits, and invoicing, all in one place.

FAQs

  1. Is Metronome a billing platform or a metering layer?

Metronome is primarily a metering and usage rating layer, not a full billing platform.

It does not natively handle:

  • Full subscription lifecycle management

  • Credits, wallets, or auto top-ups

  • Unified invoices (subscription + usage + credits)

  • Customer-facing real-time dashboards

  • Pricing experiments without engineering changes

This is why teams often pair it with other systems or eventually replace it.

  1. Why is pricing agility so hard with Metronome?

Metronome is built for stable usage models, not rapid experimentation. Common pain points:

  • Every new tier, discount, or customer‑specific plan often requires changes to rate cards and event schemas.

  • Mid‑cycle upgrades and proration aren’t native; you end up with custom logic and workarounds.

  • Historical data may need re‑processing or backfilling when pricing changes.

  • Finance can’t see the impact of a pricing change until the invoice is generated.

Modern platforms like Flexprice solve this by making pricing logic config‑driven, versioned, and decoupled from core code.

  1. How do credits and wallets work in Flexprice vs. Metronome?

Metronome:

Credits are not a first‑class concept. You can do invoice adjustments or promotional offsets, but you can’t easily:

  • Track real‑time credit balances per customer.

  • Tie credits to specific features or entitlements.

  • Use credits to control access or enforce limits.

Flexprice:

  • Credits are a core abstraction:

  • Persistent, per‑account credit wallets with auto top‑ups and promotions.

  • Credit expiry, rollover, and usage limits.

  • Feature entitlements and access control tied to credit balances.

  1. Can I keep using Metronome for metering and pair it with another billing system?

Yes, but it comes with trade‑offs:

  • You’ll have two systems (Metronome + Stripe/Chargebee/etc.) with different data models and APIs.

  • Invoicing, proration, and subscription logic live in the billing system, while usage logic lives in Metronome.

This creates a fragile pipeline: if Metronome and the billing system disagree on usage, it’s hard to debug and reconcile.

Flexprice avoids this by combining metering, pricing, and billing in one platform, so there’s only one source of truth.

  1. Is Flexprice only for AI and usage‑heavy SaaS?

Flexprice is optimized for AI, API, and usage‑heavy SaaS, but it works for any product that needs:

  • Granular usage metering (API calls, tokens, compute, etc.).

  • Flexible pricing (subscription, usage, hybrid, credit‑based).

  • Complex contracts (ramped, parent‑child, enterprise deals).

If your product is moving beyond simple seat‑based pricing and into usage‑based, credit‑based, or outcome‑based models, Flexprice is a strong fit.

  1. Orb

Orb is a user-friendly billing and revenue platform for SaaS and AI companies. It is a great choice as a Metronome alternative for businesses with simple and straightforward billing needs.

While Metronome is primarily built for metering purposes, Orb includes metering, billing, native invoicing, reporting, and pricing experimentation tools.

Key Features

  • User-friendly dashboard: Orb provides dashboards so that teams can look at pricing and track usage and review invoices without much engineering intervention.

  • Workflow and tool integrations: It can be integrated with your CRMs, payment processors, and accounting tools so that teams have everything connected and in one place.

  • Metering and billing: Orb provides great metering and billing layers so that you don’t lose out on your potential revenue. 

  • Revenue recognition: It is ASC606-compliant and automates revenue recognition reporting down to the customer or event level.

  • Flexible pricing: You can test various pricing strategies with pricing models like usage, tiered, and hybrid models. 

That being said, Orb provides limited customization options and may not scale well with your product. It gets difficult for you with your complex billing needs.

Who is it best for?

SaaS and AI companies that are looking for simple usage tracking and billing; teams that are not really looking for agency and want their basic billing needs to be fulfilled.

  1. Amberflo

Amberflo is a cloud-based billing platform with great metering capabilities that turns usage into auditable bills along with accurate invoicing. 

It is a good option as a Metronome alternative particularly for companies needing massive scale, real-time usage metering, and deep analytics, often excelling where Metronome might hit throughput limits or offer less flexibility. 

Key Features

  • Real-time metering: It can ingest and track high volumes of events 

  • Flexible pricing: Your teams can model flat based, usage-based and hybrid pricing models

  • Cost tracking and FinOps: It provides dashboards for cost attribution for each compute unit to customers and teams to improve margins and prevent revenue loss.

  • Analytics and reporting: It supports in-depth analytics and data visibility for better decision making

  • Integration: It integrates well with your existing CRM and payment gateways for seamless experience. 

Amberflo still has a long way to go when it comes to customization and your teams will probably struggle with complex pricing and billing 

Who is it best for?

AI and SaaS companies that are operating in limited geographies and not looking at much customization and niche needs. 

  1. Lago

Lago is an open-source billing platform that is good for usage-based metering and billing along with subscription management and invoices as well. 

Lago can be considered a good Metronome alternative because of its open source nature, built-in invoicing and control that you get over your billing. 

It handles complex pricing models and integrates with various payment gateways for seamless billing and invoicing. Legacy tools like Metronome often stop at metering. 

Key Features

  • Open-source: Lago can be self-hosted and cloud-hosted for maximum flexibility

  • Real-time usage tracking: You can track all the events in real-time for accurate billing

  • Flexible pricing: You get the flexibility to go with various pricing models to see what fits the best 

  • High-volume event ingestion: Lago can handle high-volumes of events from metering to billing

To deploy Lago, you need a dedicated engineering team and extra resources to self-host and to maintain the platform regularly. 

Who is it best for?

It is best suited for companies that have just started and have extra engineering bandwidth to add custom codes for advanced billing and finance features. 

  1. Stripe Billing 

Stripe Billing is a programmable billing platform that enables flexible pricing models and works across multiple currencies. It helps centralize revenue operations, reducing reliance on custom scripts and manual calculations.

Stripe’s acquisition of Metronome brings advanced usage‑based billing capabilities directly into the Stripe platform, turning it into a powerful, all‑in‑one solution that now competes with and effectively absorbs Metronome’s standalone functionality for modern SaaS and API businesses.

Key features

  • Flexible pricing models: Stripe supports tiered, usage‑based, and hybrid pricing, so you can easily match your billing to how customers actually use your product.

  • Real‑time usage tracking: You can capture and track usage events as they happen, ensuring accurate, up‑to‑date billing without delays.

  • Security & compliance: Built with PCI DSS Level 1, SOC, and ISO 27001 certifications, so your data and customer payments stay secure and compliant.

  • Global payment processing: Run multi‑currency billing seamlessly, letting customers pay in their local currency and expanding your reach worldwide.

Stripe works well for flat, seat-based plans and you get vendor-locked with a rigid credit system and limited visibility and transparency. Now that it has acquired Metronome, it is quite complex to adopt without a single data model or support for complex billing requirements.

Who is it best for?

Stripe Billing is the best option for teams that are looking at basic subscription plans and billing features. 

Flexprice: The Ultimate Metronome Alternative

If you are using Metronome, you probably know that you have got a solid event pipeline and a system that turns these raw events into billable metrics but that is where the super power ends.

Your finance cannot see the real-time impact of a pricing change until the invoice lands, every new tier, discount, or mid-cycle upgrade needs a code change and a migration, your customers get complex and confusing invoices, and when you want to experiment with credit-based pricing, ramped contracts, or parent-child accounts, you’re back to square one with custom scripts that feel like patchwork.

This is when Flexprice steps up. You can ingest high-volume event streams 20bn events a month via Kafka, gRPC, or REST, with built-in aggregation. Flexprice supports granular usage tracking with low-latency, high-accuracy metering. You can also test various pricing models (subscription, usage, hybrid, credit-based) with volume tiers, packages, overage, and customer-specific overrides; and deploy a new pricing model in days. 

With Flexprice, your billing is unified with clear invoices that combine subscriptions, usage, and credit adjustments, with multi-currency, tax, and global invoicing. 

Head over to Flexprice’s docs to see how it works under the hood, from event ingestion and metering to pricing, credits, and invoicing, all in one place.

FAQs

  1. Is Metronome a billing platform or a metering layer?

Metronome is primarily a metering and usage rating layer, not a full billing platform.

It does not natively handle:

  • Full subscription lifecycle management

  • Credits, wallets, or auto top-ups

  • Unified invoices (subscription + usage + credits)

  • Customer-facing real-time dashboards

  • Pricing experiments without engineering changes

This is why teams often pair it with other systems or eventually replace it.

  1. Why is pricing agility so hard with Metronome?

Metronome is built for stable usage models, not rapid experimentation. Common pain points:

  • Every new tier, discount, or customer‑specific plan often requires changes to rate cards and event schemas.

  • Mid‑cycle upgrades and proration aren’t native; you end up with custom logic and workarounds.

  • Historical data may need re‑processing or backfilling when pricing changes.

  • Finance can’t see the impact of a pricing change until the invoice is generated.

Modern platforms like Flexprice solve this by making pricing logic config‑driven, versioned, and decoupled from core code.

  1. How do credits and wallets work in Flexprice vs. Metronome?

Metronome:

Credits are not a first‑class concept. You can do invoice adjustments or promotional offsets, but you can’t easily:

  • Track real‑time credit balances per customer.

  • Tie credits to specific features or entitlements.

  • Use credits to control access or enforce limits.

Flexprice:

  • Credits are a core abstraction:

  • Persistent, per‑account credit wallets with auto top‑ups and promotions.

  • Credit expiry, rollover, and usage limits.

  • Feature entitlements and access control tied to credit balances.

  1. Can I keep using Metronome for metering and pair it with another billing system?

Yes, but it comes with trade‑offs:

  • You’ll have two systems (Metronome + Stripe/Chargebee/etc.) with different data models and APIs.

  • Invoicing, proration, and subscription logic live in the billing system, while usage logic lives in Metronome.

This creates a fragile pipeline: if Metronome and the billing system disagree on usage, it’s hard to debug and reconcile.

Flexprice avoids this by combining metering, pricing, and billing in one platform, so there’s only one source of truth.

  1. Is Flexprice only for AI and usage‑heavy SaaS?

Flexprice is optimized for AI, API, and usage‑heavy SaaS, but it works for any product that needs:

  • Granular usage metering (API calls, tokens, compute, etc.).

  • Flexible pricing (subscription, usage, hybrid, credit‑based).

  • Complex contracts (ramped, parent‑child, enterprise deals).

If your product is moving beyond simple seat‑based pricing and into usage‑based, credit‑based, or outcome‑based models, Flexprice is a strong fit.

Aanchal Parmar

Aanchal Parmar

Aanchal Parmar

Aanchal Parmar

Aanchal Parmar heads content marketing at Flexprice.io. She’s been in the content for seven years across SaaS, Web3, and now AI infra. When she’s not writing about monetization, she’s either signing up for a new dance class or testing a recipe that’s definitely too ambitious for a weeknight.

Aanchal Parmar heads content marketing at Flexprice.io. She’s been in the content for seven years across SaaS, Web3, and now AI infra. When she’s not writing about monetization, she’s either signing up for a new dance class or testing a recipe that’s definitely too ambitious for a weeknight.

Aanchal Parmar heads content marketing at Flexprice.io. She’s been in the content for seven years across SaaS, Web3, and now AI infra. When she’s not writing about monetization, she’s either signing up for a new dance class or testing a recipe that’s definitely too ambitious for a weeknight.

Aanchal Parmar heads content marketing at Flexprice.io. She’s been in the content for seven years across SaaS, Web3, and now AI infra. When she’s not writing about monetization, she’s either signing up for a new dance class or testing a recipe that’s definitely too ambitious for a weeknight.

Dec 27, 2025

Dec 27, 2025

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Ship Usage-Based Billing with Flexprice

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