What’s New in m3ter: September 2022

Welcome to our new monthly series, “What’s new in m3ter”! We're here to help and inspire you on your usage-based pricing (UBP) journey, and product innovation and improvement is key to our ongoing commitment. Each month we’ll share the latest features and fixes in the m3ter platform that are sure to get you excited. We’ll also share a roundup of the latest news in the UBP community for inspiration. 

Let’s jump in to see what’s hot off the press.

New Features & Fixes:

You now have more options than ever before in how you price and charge Accounts. You have the flexibility to be creative with how you charge, incentivize, or credit back your customers. And with advanced billing hierarchy, you have more control over billing at the Parent or Child level and how the line items appear, rolling usage and other charges into the final bill. 

Offer pay-as-you-go pricing with Balances

Enable your customers to control how much they spend with Balances. Think of it as a wallet, with options to top up a balance and then draw down throughout the billing period. Your customers can better control how much they spend, while you have a better pulse on revenue.

Here are some ways you can use Balances:

• Credit to onboard: Incentivize customers to sign up and receive a credit upon joining. Once they’ve used up this credit, they’ve seen the value in your product, increasing the likelihood of converting them to a paid plan.
• Commitments: Allow your customers to pay in an amount of their choosing to add to their account balance that they can then draw down over a period of time, with a time-bound option. Gauge your customers' usage by how quickly they’re drawing down and kick off a conversation to either top up the commitment, purchase a greater usage allowance at a discount, or to renegotiate. Your customer then has predictable spend and your variable revenue is limited.

For more details, check out our Docs here. Note that this feature is available today through our API and will be available in the Console in the next few weeks.

Improve customer satisfaction with Credit Line Items on Bills

After you bill a customer, you can issue credit back to them with Credit Line Items. You can use m3ter as your single source of truth to push a final bill with credits to your invoicing tool, as well as provide full visibility to your sales team of the credits directly in your CRM.

Here are some ways you can use Credit Line Items:

• Customer satisfaction: Add credits to Accounts with technical or support issues as an act of goodwill, enabling you to build customer loyalty through product credits. 
• Bill correction: We all make mistakes. If you need to correct or make an adjustment to a past bill, credit line items give you full flexibility to do so.

Credit customers for unused usage with Negative Pricing

Billing with usage-based pricing is a way to differentiate in the market, by only charging your customers what they use. With Negative Pricing, you now have the ability to automatically credit a customer based on their consumption of a credit line item on their monthly bill. 

Negative Pricing allows you to credit your customers back for seats not actively used in a billing period. For commitment overages, you can rate the usage but not charge – enabling you to discount customer overages. And if you work with resellers, you can credit your resellers back from what they have successfully sold. 

Negative Pricing provides flexibility in how you credit back usage, offer discounts, and go to market in new and creative ways. 

Configure Accounts with advanced Billing Hierarchies

m3ter now provides you with a highly flexible and powerful way to configure, manage, and bill complex hierarchical Account relationships.

Being able to configure different billing hierarchies allows you to:

1. How usage is calculated: Pricing can be set and calculated per Child, rolled up to the Parent, or a combination.
2. How the bill is itemized: Usage from each Child Account can be shown as a separate line item or summarized as together under the Parent Account.
3. Who pays for the bill: You can allocate whether to bill each Child or the Parent Account.

m3ter Billing Hierarchies allow you to better negotiate deals based on expected consumption within an Account, such as volume pricing. With the ability to then distribute bills to the correct customer location (such as a specific department or headquarters), it saves your finance team valuable time with automated bill creation and creates a seamless customer experience.

Learn how to set up your preferred billing hierarchies for your Parent/Child Accounts here. 

Fixes across m3ter

• Data Explorer: Improved Query builder layout for retrieving usage, billing, and pre-payments data with easier filter selection and set-up.
• Pricing Editor: Pricing grid enhancements provide easier access to pricing schedules for Plans and direct access to historic or future pricing. 
• Attached Plans for Accounts: Accounts tab renamed to make a clear separation between Plan and Account Plan.

Inspiration & Insights from our partners and the community:

• The Ultimate Guide to Usage-Based Pricing
• Why This CEO Will Never Return to the Office
• Roadmap: Software Powering the PLG Era
• How Usage-Based Pricing Affects Billing Operations
• The rise of product-led growth is creating opportunities for startups
• 3 Top Pricing Tips from SaaStr 2022

Check out our Changelog for a running list of feature releases.