How much time does your team spend building pricing and billing in-house?
Almost every team building usage-based or credit-based pricing I’ve talked to says something like:
“We just have to aggregate events, multiply with a price, and send it to Stripe.
Shouldn’t take more than a week.”
And a few months later, the reality hits when billing has quietly turned into an entire product of its own.
Suddenly, you’re debugging:
Auto top-ups that fail for specific edge cases
Cancellations that don’t sync across plans
Credits that don’t roll over correctly
Invoices that customers don’t trust
By then, 80% of the team’s bandwidth goes into fixing billing instead of building core features.
So I’m curious to know
How much time has your team actually spent building or maintaining pricing & billing?
Was it worth doing in-house?
If you were starting today, would you still build it yourself?
Replies
Saw a known company go through this exact loop last year. Thought it’d be a week-long task, turned into a 4-month rabbit hole.
They built everything in-house: usage tracking, invoicing, credits, top-ups — the whole thing.
Eventually realized maintaining it was eating up way too much dev time.
This hits so close to home. Billing always looks simple on paper “just aggregate usage and charge users”, until you realize you’ve basically built a fintech system inside your SaaS. Edge cases, syncing issues, invoice mismatches….it never ends.
This is so true. Billing always looks simple from the outside, but once you get into edge cases, upgrades/downgrades, credit rollovers, and invoice reconciliation — it’s a beast. Most teams underestimate how much “non-core” work ends up owning their roadmap.