Macabacus switched from fixed-price to usage-based billing for its AI product. Rahul Gill explains why variable AI costs required precise token metering and cost transparency, and why they chose Schematic for its metering capabilities, usage caps, and hands-on support over larger vendors.
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My name is Rahul Gill. I work for Macabacus and I lead customer experience. We had just launched our first AI product, or rather we had built our first AI product, and we didn't really have a way to monetize it. The thing with AI offerings are there's usually a variable cost involved. So we had this new conundrum of handling usage-based billing. We had never been in that situation before, so we were looking for solutions that would help us monitor usage, handle, get a handle on our token costs, then eventually like pass those on to the customer. We've been around since 2008. To date, we've been a standard SaaS company with fixed costs and fixed prices, so essentially just standard tiered pricing. But now introducing AI features, this of course brings in the usage-based components. It's a new world. The biggest thing that was top of mind at the time definitely was strong capability around metering and actually accurately, keyword accurately, tracking token costs because that's eventually what we're passing on to the customer. And there needs to be some transparency there as well. Like, you have to get that right. So that was the biggest thing that stood out to us about Schematic is that capability was there. We wanted to avoid having to build that on our own and have our engineers need to really like manage a metering system. There's really no appetite for that here. So that's why Schematic really stood out for us. You want to look at more things like usage caps, bundles to buy more top-ups, like You need to be able to give the customer some sort of predictability around cost. That's really what they're looking for. Um, so being able to offer different options ties into that as well. Of course, that's what Schematic supports, and it really is like what made it stand out to us too. 1,000%. Like, that is, was the key thing. And also beyond just the Schematic platform, even the services and expertise from your side has been huge for us as we've been trying to wrap our heads around this. This is all new to many. So being able to have and use Schematic as a trusted advisor, the service component has also been very valuable along with just the flexibility in the platform because we could change a, like say a special negotiation with a customer, we could change our, we could change the package overnight. So having a system that actually accommodates that is huge. You definitely want to do your due diligence, that's for sure. I think there's Few vendors report to do usage-based billing, but what we quickly learned is that that can mean different things. The level of sophistication that different vendors offer are just are just different. What we found with schematic is you guys are very very close to this. You have an understanding of the landscape, and you also just been able to advise us from day one, which really made you guys stand out. As opposed to other vendors, especially some of the larger ones. I found, just to speak candidly, some of the larger vendors, like if you just go to one of the large vendors with their billing system out of the box usage-based billing without using an add-in like Schematic or an add-on like Schematic, they seemed, they're still trying to figure out what this really looks like. I think they have some more work to do in terms of enablements. It really felt like we were bringing in a specialist. essentially, which was huge, especially given a lot of this is new to our, to our team.
