Ryan, a former CTO, joined Schematic to escape the pain of hardcoding pricing logic into his product. The platform turns billing into simple feature-flag checks and handles usage-based pricing natively, freeing his team to build features instead of maintaining custom billing infrastructure.
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Hi, I'm Ryan, a developer at Schematic, and in this video I want to talk about why I joined Schematic. Before Schematic, I've been an engineering manager and a CTO, and implementing and managing pricing and packaging has always been a huge drain on me and my teams. When I heard about Schematic and their promise to decouple business logic from code, I knew they were onto something special and I immediately wanted to join. Schematic's done something really cool by simplifying complex billing logic into a feature flag check, an interface that we're already used to using and thinking about in our code. Much like with feature flags, we identify the user and the company they work for to Schematic and then ask if they should be able to use a specific feature. Schematic does the hard work of tracking plans, usage, entitlements, and gives us a simple yes or no about whether they should be able to take the given action. This gives us tremendous ongoing benefit. As plans and pricing changes, our code never needs to change, which gives us more time to focus on the features that really matter to our users. Additionally, Schematic is built from the ground up to support usage-based pricing. Schematic's already built an entire event processing system so you don't have to. Finally, I want to talk about company overrides, our most popular and powerful feature. A company override is a way to give a specific company an additional entitlement beyond what their plan has, or additional usage beyond what their plan allows them. There are a number of different use cases where company overrides are really helpful. First, let's imagine you have enterprise contracts where every company signing up has a bespoke deal that's negotiated line by line. It's really easy to set up a default plan, which includes the baseline that all enterprise companies have, but then one by one, entitle the company to the extra rights or extra usage that it's paid for within its specific contract. Second, let's imagine the all-too-common scenario where the sales team comes to you because a customer wants to upgrade, but before they do, they want to try out a feature. In Schematic, it's easy to grant them access to the feature they're looking for without needing to do any extra work on— within your product to make this possible. Moreover, we can also set an expiration date to make sure that if they don't upgrade, they lose access to that feature within a reasonable amount of time. And ultimately, overrides can be used to help save customers that might churn, whether that's giving them additional access or allowing them more usage of features that matter to them. Saving and preserving revenue is one of the most important things we can do, and Schematic makes that easy. Those were some of the key pain points that me and my engineers ran into with our homegrown billing system built directly into our codebase. I've been so impressed how schematic makes these problems go away and gives engineers more time to focus on their customers and the features that they love most. Thanks.
