Real-Time Data Streaming, Right From the Start
Modern SaaS companies are increasingly shifting to usage-based pricing models—and Metronome is helping them do it. Founded to support this growing market need, Metronome offers a powerful billing platform that enables businesses to track usage, achieve invoice visibility, price dynamically, and deliver a best-in-class billing experience—all in real time.
From the outset, Metronome recognized that delivering on the promise of usage-based billing would require a fast, reliable, and scalable data streaming backbone. Instead of building and managing that infrastructure internally, the company made a deliberate decision to adopt the Confluent data streaming platform—right from day one.
“There was no world where we wanted to spend our time early on maintaining our own broker fleet,” said Cosmo Wolfe, Head of Technology at Metronome. “The Confluent data streaming platform was a very natural choice. It enabled us to offload the management of our streaming infrastructure and stay focused on building the core of our billing platform.”
Powering Innovation With a Real-Time Data Platform
Metronome was built with speed and scale in mind. As a billing platform for fast-moving SaaS companies, it needed to deliver real-time pricing and invoicing at an enterprise scale—handling complex data streams with accuracy and low latency.
To achieve this vision, Metronome prioritized adopting a cloud-native, fully managed data streaming solution that would allow its engineers to dedicate resources to product innovation, not wrangling infrastructure.
“We’re currently streaming billions of events per day,” said Wolfe. “But despite this volume, we only need to allocate 10% of our engineering resources to maintain these systems. The amount of complex features we’re able to bring to market faster as a result of this is a huge competitive advantage.”
With Confluent powering real-time streaming and processing for their billing platform, Metronome is able to move faster, innovate more freely, and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market.
Enabling Real-Time Billing Use Cases at Massive Scale
By leveraging Confluent, Metronome gives its customers the power to build modern, usage-based pricing models and financial systems—without being limited by scale or data throughput.
“Metronome’s billing platform processes tens of thousands of invoices per second with no downtime,” said Wolfe. “And all of that is powered by real-time streaming data through Confluent Cloud.”
Customers can implement everything from seat-based subscriptions with usage limits to true pay-as-you-go pricing based on API calls, server minutes, token usage, or other real-time consumption metrics.
As end-user activity generates streams of usage events, those events flow into Confluent and drive core user-facing experiences like.
Real-time visibility into usage and spend so customers can track how much they've used—and how much they’re spending—down to the second.
Automated downstream workflows that act on specific usage thresholds or event patterns, such as cutting off access after a spend limit is reached, generating an invoice, or triggering a notification.
These capabilities allow Metronome's customers to offer dynamic, real-time billing experiences that are deeply tied to product usage—critical for AI companies, infrastructure providers, and any business operating on a metered model.
To power this architecture, Metronome uses key Confluent Cloud features, including:
Schema Registry to ensure consistent data formats across teams and services
High availability and elastic scaling to support real-time workloads as usage grows
Pre-Built Connectors to stream data in and out of systems cleanly without needing to build costly, custom integrations
Time to Value in Record Time With an Agile Streaming Architecture
With Confluent running on AWS and powering its event-driven billing engine, Metronome has seen significant business benefits:
Faster product development: 90% of Metronome’s engineering resources can be spent on building features customers care about—instead of managing infrastructure
High availability: Metronome’s billing platform exceeds SLAs, even as customer volumes grow and tens of thousands of invoices are processed per second
Streamlined scaling: Metronome has no need to re-architect systems as throughput increases, streaming billions of events per day with consistent performance
“We leverage the Confluent data streaming platform on top of AWS,” said Wolfe. “This partnership has been important to us, because it’s allowed us to build a highly scalable, differentiated offering on a solid foundation provided by two reliable, best-in-class platforms.”
By leveraging Confluent and AWS from the beginning, Metronome avoided the common trap of building one-off solutions and overleveraging resources to manage complicated infrastructure in-house. Instead, the team invested in technologies that would support long-term scale and complexity—without requiring constant firefighting.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Financial Data is Real Time
As Metronome grows, it’s setting its sights on how AI and real-time data can unlock even more value for its customers. The team is exploring ways to leverage Confluent to fuel new AI-driven capabilities, including:
Revenue forecasting to help customers anticipate trends and plan proactively
Anomaly detection to flag unusual or unexpected revenue patterns in real time
AI-assisted product insights, such as usage-based recommendations for optimizing spend or expanding offerings
Metronome also aims to lead the industry in bringing financial and billing data closer to real time. By harnessing the power of data streaming, it’s closing the gap between when usage occurs and when that activity translates into actionable business insight.
“Real-time experiences are table stakes—especially in the billing space,” said Wolfe. “If you're going to build those kinds of experiences, you need a data streaming platform. There’s no other way to meet the expectations customers have today.”
