Every article in the archive — pricing teardowns, billing system reviews, and strategy deep-dives.
Recurly has been quietly powering subscription management since 2009. Not the flashiest, but operationally solid where it counts: dunning, payment recovery, and multi-gateway flexibility.
Paddle is the Merchant of Record that handles global tax compliance so you don't have to. Here's what that's worth, what it costs, and who should actually use it.
Maxio (SaaSOptics + Chargify) combines subscription analytics and billing for mid-market SaaS. The merger left some seams, but the integrated financial reporting is genuinely useful.
Zuora went private after losing 85% of its IPO value. It still powers billing for hundreds of large enterprises. Here's why — and when it's still the right call.
Chargebee has been a fixture in SaaS billing since 2011. Mature, battle-tested, and genuinely good at subscription lifecycle management — if that's what you actually need.
Orb's differentiator: pricing as declarative data, not hardcoded logic. If you change prices more than once a year, the engineering overhead savings alone justify the platform fee.
Metronome powers billing for Databricks and OpenAI. Stripe paid ~$1B for it in 2025. Here's what it does that Stripe Billing couldn't, and whether you need it.
Lago is the MIT-licensed alternative to Stripe Billing and Chargebee. Self-host it for free, or pay for managed cloud. Here's when the tradeoff makes sense.
Stripe Billing is where most SaaS companies start. Fastest time-to-live, great DX, 0.5% of revenue. Here's where it hits walls and when to consider alternatives.
$2 per conversation. No seats, no tokens — Salesforce is betting its $35B business on outcome-adjacent pricing for AI agents. Everyone is watching to see if it works.
Per-token pricing was a developer convenience that became a default business model. It creates adversarial optimization and means nothing to enterprise buyers. The replacements are coming.
Credits are everywhere, but most credit systems are designed casually. Five decisions you need to make deliberately: exchange rates, tiered pricing, refresh cycles, pooling, and currency design.