Billing Platform
Building For Iteration-Ready Pricing
Product and engineering teams are primarily responsible for building billing mechanisms within your product offering. Over time, especially with the need to focus on forward product feature development, billing capabilities tend to become obsolete or tightly coupled to a single core offering. As a result, the billing system often is the bottleneck for key growth initiatives, particularly experimentation with pricing and packaging.
Features to consider for flexible pricing
- Pricing and Packaging Management: Pricing plans can vary from a simple flat-fee structure to a complicated multi-year plan with different frequencies of billing counting multiple different metrics in a single plan. Consider more user-friendly billing options for usage-based billing and seat-based billing and trials allow your users to try your product before they purchase it.
- Entitlements: Your billing system needs to enable management of different sets of features for different plans without any engineering involvement. This enables autonomy for product and sales leaders to easily experiment with different features in different packages and customization of the feature set for larger customers without having to rely on your engineering to implement those changes.
- Enterprise Sales: A large part of the go-to-market process relies on experimentation with sales motions. Contracts and proposals can be a big part of this process and typically the software used to create the contract is disconnected from your billing system. Plans, pricing and packaging constantly change which makes managing contracts and product onboarding tedious with systems that are out of sync. These manual steps lead to delays and mistakes that need to be accounted for by supporting deep integrations with the contracts software.
- Easy Integrations: Billing capabilities need to tie into other third-party tools such as accounting software, payment providers, CRM software and contract software. Enabling quick and robust integrations in key to enable downstream stakeholder workflows.
- Payment Providers: Consider integrating with multiple payment providers not only for resilience to outages but also to negotiate for competitive payment processing rates and support multiple forms of payments for your customers.
Achieve Iteration-Ready Pricing with Maple
Mastering the art of billing engineering is a smart investment for any business looking to thrive in the modern marketplace. However, building a billing platform is a significant undertaking that requires an eye for the future of your business. Maple enables all the required capabilities so that you can focus on your core product offerings and while having hassle-free pricing capabilities.
Learn more about our pricing capabilities.