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usage-based or flat $29 with 40 customers and nobody to build metering Unit Economics
40 paying customers on a flat $29/mo, invoicing tool with document generation. Everyone tells me usage-based is where the money is, and the cost side does vary a lot - one customer generated 4,100 documents last month and the median is 90.
What I keep bouncing off is the build. Real metering means: an events table, idempotency so a retry does not double count, aggregation, a way to show customers their current usage before the invoice lands, handling mid-cycle plan changes, credits when I screw up. That is not a weekend. I estimate six weeks and I am the only engineer.
At 40 customers, is that six weeks worth it, or am I optimising for a company I do not have yet?
@integral_ines · 3mo ago · 2 replies
Stay flat, but stop being flat silently.
At 40 customers you can do this with a spreadsheet and thirty minutes a month. Add a hard-ish cap to the $29 plan - say 500 documents. Track the count (a single counter column, not an events table). When someone goes over, you email them personally and put them on a $99 plan you invoice manually.
That gets you the entire economic benefit of usage-based pricing with about four hours of work instead of six weeks. It also teaches you what the right meter and the right price actually are, which you currently do not know. The number of people who build beautiful metering on the wrong unit is enormous - you meter documents, then discover customers think in "clients" or "projects" and your invoice is unreadable to them.
Build the real system when manual invoicing genuinely hurts. For me that was around 120 customers and by then I knew exactly what to build.
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@bruno_calder · 3mo ago
The bit about metering the wrong unit lands. My customers absolutely talk in clients, not documents, and I had not connected that to how the invoice would read.
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