A Powerful Solution for Flexible Usage Drawdowns

With m3ter, vendors can enable their end-customers to draw down from any number of Balances in any currency, all tracked in real-time. 

Key takeaways:

• m3ter Balances enables you to create any number of Balances – like a wallet – for your customers to draw down from.
• The ledger-like functionality makes it easy to maintain multiple balances on the same account, each of which can have different expiration dates, rollover policies, and products they apply to. 
• The advanced m3ter Parent/Child structure can also hold Balances, allowing you to define rules on which plans draw down from Parent versus Child Accounts.

Introducing: m3ter Balances

With m3ter Balances, vendors can allow their end-customers to draw down from any number of Balances in any currency, all tracked in real-time.

Balances are like a wallet your end customers can draw down from. This can be custom currencies (like credits or a meter such as API calls) OR fiat currencies (like USD or Euro). You can also choose to have balances against specific product lines of your choosing.

With the ledger-like functionality, you can create separate Balances to manage drawdowns, making it simple to hold multiple amounts for different purposes (e.g., trial Balances, POC Balances, Balance to draw down specific usage types against).

This ability to maintain multiple balances on the same account is powerful and flexible: each Balance can have different expiration dates, rollover policies, and products they apply to. The advanced m3ter Parent/Child structure can also hold Balances, allowing you to define rules on which plans draw down from Parent versus Child Accounts.

Typical use case: Managing usage-based subscriptions

In modern SaaS, usage-based subscriptions have become a common form of hybrid pricing – a combination of a traditional predictable subscription with a usage-based component (such as an allowance). It’s a powerful model that gives companies the best of both worlds, but it’s also inherently difficult to systemize. 

The vendor has to keep track of every customer’s usage (or drawdown against an allowance) at any given time and resurface that data in multiple places: in financial calculations and bills, in the product to show customers their usage, in a place where Sales can see upsell opportunities, and so on.

Even in a simple usage-based subscription situation, tracking is usually done manually and errors are inevitable. As soon as you add any level of segmentation and a growing customer base, it gets even harder – and it’s basically impossible for a spreadsheet and manual processes to keep up. 

The downstream effects only get worse: lost revenue from missed upsell opportunities, a massive risk of revenue leakage, drained BillingOps capacity, and lower customer trust, just to name a few.

m3ter Balances enables our customers to manage usage-based subscriptions better – but it doesn’t stop there.

Other use cases for m3ter Balances

The m3ter Balances functionality is a powerful tool for usage-based subscriptions, but there are a number of other use cases. Some hypothetical examples (based on real customers) can be seen below. 

Balances: Examples in practice

Positive impact across the business

m3ter Balances can have significant business impact for a number of teams:

• Finance – The ledger functionality of Balances improves auditability. Finance can easily see how much balance was initially purchased, manually add to the balance, and see the bills as they draw down.
• Engineering – Balances are hard to pull off in build-your-own billing infrastructure, and even harder combined with Commitments/Prepayments. With m3ter, your engineers won’t have to build separate containers for Balances. The advanced logic within our platform enables all these features to play well together.
• Pricing – Balances allows the Pricing team to get more granular with commitment balance/amount. For example, vendors can make changes in the middle of a contract to track usage on a new Proof of Concept (POC) – and it can all be tracked via a Balance. You can choose to have a trial balance by default for a self-serve customer that automatically ends, and move to a pay-go model at the end of the balance period or once the allocated balance has been used up.
• Sales –  Balances can aid a PLG motion by helping with onboarding incentives or product trials. Especially for enterprise products, you might not want to give trials an unlimited amount of usage. Balances allow you to contain the trial with a limit – either for usage or time expiration – so your customers can explore. You can even set up triggered notifications so Sales can reach out when the customer is close to consuming all of their balance. This all helps you better sell at the end of the trial, either by moving straight into regular pricing or opening the opportunity for a Sales conversation.

What’s the difference between Balances and Commitments?

You can use both Balances and Commitments (also known as prepayments) to help manage credit amounts for your end-customer Accounts, but they serve different purposes:

• Commitments are used for amounts end-customers have agreed to pay for consuming your product or services across a full contract term.
• In contrast, a Balance – often referred to as a top-up or prepaid drawdown – is used when a customer wants to add a credit amount to their Account or you (as service provider) want to add a credit to a customer Account. This Balance credit can then be drawn down against for billing the Account for usage.
  
  Balances therefore serve payment use cases in a more flexible way; for example, to be used as a "Free Credit" sign-up scheme to encourage sales or to enhance customer satisfaction by adding credit to an Account when there have been issues delivering your service.

You can use Commitments and Balances together, with the option to draw down against the Balance credit amount before or after draw down against any Prepayment amounts on an Account.

Getting started with m3ter Balances

Running usage-based subscriptions with spreadsheets or build-your-own infrastructure can lead to lost upsell opportunities, revenue leakage, drained BillingOps capacity, and lower customer trust.

With m3ter, our Balances feature makes it easy to provide a segmentable wallet for end-customers to draw down from using custom or fiat currencies, based on the specific product lines you choose.

Schedule a demo and see how the powerful m3ter platform can seamlessly manage your complex billing for any shade of pricing.