“We believe the shift toward usage-based models will be a defining feature of the next decade for our industry,” Stripe Co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison said in announcing the completed deal on Wednesday (Jan. 14). “Metering and billing are in a very direct sense the interface between ‘product’ and ‘business.’”
He added that the Metronome team had developed “an exceptionally powerful metering engine” used by artificial intelligence (AI) giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and Nvidia. Scott Woody, CEO of Metronome, added that by joining Stripe, his company was expanding its ambition “significantly.”
“Together, we’re building the foundational monetization infrastructure for the next generation of software: systems that are flexible, data-driven, and capable of supporting everything from two engineers in a garage to the largest global enterprises,” he said. “For customers, this means deeper partnerships, faster product development, and a more powerful, reliable, and integrated platform spanning Metronome and Stripe.”
Stripe announced last month it had signed an agreement to acquire Metronome, with plans to integrate the company’s usage-based billing capabilities for software companies into its own billing platform. Terms of the deal were not released.
“Metered pricing is the native business model for the [artificial intelligence (AI)] era,” Collison said at the time. “As far as we can tell, the associated shift in how businesses generate revenue will be as big as the advent of SaaS. (It may even turn out to be considerably bigger),” he added, referring to “Software-as-a-Service.”
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PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote last month about the role Stripe plays in AI-driven commerce via its work in developing the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).
The protocol emerged from the partnership between Stripe and Open AI, and brings together the “the dominant conversational interface and one of the most widely adopted payment platforms,” Webster said.
Together, they created a protocol that allows agents to carry out purchases inside the AI experience while keeping a merchant’s tech and payment stack intact.
“Stripe brings decades of experience in digital payments, compliance and settlement workflows. OpenAI brings a deep understanding of how conversational intent becomes transaction ready,” Webster added. “Their bet is straightforward. ACP gives agents a standardized way to send orders into systems that already work for human checkout. Agents discover products, build carts, authorize payments and trigger fulfillment through flows merchants already trust.”
