Stripe Acquires Metronome to Enhance Metered Pricing Capabilities for AI Companies

Payments infrastructure FinTech Stripe signed a definitive agreement to acquire Metronome, a usage-based billing platform for software companies.

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison announced the agreement in a Tuesday (Dec. 2) post on X, saying the company will integrate Metronome’s capabilities with the rest of the Stripe Billing platform.

“Metered pricing is the native business model for the [artificial intelligence (AI)]  era,” Collison said in the post. “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.)”

Metronome CEO Scott Woody said in a Tuesday post on X that he was proud to announce that Metronome “is now moving to the big leagues” by signing the definitive agreement to become part of Stripe.

“Metronome isn’t going away — we’re just gonna scale way, way, way up with all the resources and amazon talent that Stripe has to offer,” Woody said in the post.

In a Tuesday blog post, Woody said the partnership brings together Stripe’s payments capabilities and Metronome’s monetization capabilities.

He added that by becoming part of Stripe’s product suite, Metronome will serve users across the full spectrum of business models and will make faster progress on adding capabilities such as seat-based credits, real-time spend alerts and hierarchical accounts.

“After spending time with Stripe’s senior leadership, I am convinced we see the same future for monetization,” Woody said in the blog post. “We share the belief that billing can evolve from a cursed backwater system into a true revenue operating platform for every software company. Faster product launches, real-time telemetry and automated finance workflows are not nice-to-have. They are levers for growth.”

Stripe launched new tools that enable businesses to better monetize their AI products in September at its Stripe Tour New York product showcase.

These offerings include features in Stripe Billing that make it simpler to run hybrid revenue models, a new application programming interface that lets companies connect to large language model providers and track inference cost changes, and a feature in Stripe Radar that block the abuse of free trial periods and other types of “friendly fraud.”

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