Billing platforms like Stripe and Chargebee handle invoices, but they're not pricing engines. Real pricing involves product catalogs, price books, and packaging decisions spread across multiple systems, creating duplicates. When companies fragment their pricing architecture instead of building a cohesive engine, they lose the ability to iterate quickly.
Chapters
No, uh, billing and pricing are not the same thing. We're talking about software and AI companies who need to monetize their customers. So they use billing platforms, things that we've all heard of, Stripe Billing, Zora, Chargebee, to manage subscriptions and send invoices. This is how I think about billing. Within a billing platform, you'll have, you know, what are effectively fields or objects for where you would insert a price. And so it's easy to conflate a billing platform with like, this is my pricing engine. This is where I'm putting my products with my prices. Another way to describe it is my product catalog. But hey, CPQ, which is quoting platforms, also have price books and products, and ERPs for accounting also have products and price books. Now you've got multiple product catalogs in multiple places. And oh, by the way, you're a software company and you're probably billing on usage. And so you're having to kind of build, you know, metering solutions and track a lot of your pricing and packaging in your database as well. And so when I say like billing and pricing are different, what I mean is like there are billing platforms and that's fundamentally different than pricing architecture in SaaS or AI. And where so many companies get really constrained and in terms of their ability to be really agile and iterative and adaptive with this incredible lever that is pricing and packaging, it comes back to having really poorly considered or piecemealed pricing architecture, not, you know, a billing platform that can't send invoices.
