Developer-first Cloud Metering and Usage-Based Pricing and Billing Platform built from the ground up to enable modern Usage-Based Pricing with real-time metering, and on-demand invoicing and billing.
An incredibly robust solution built meticulously by a world class team for the future of SaaS billing. Congrats on the launch, Puneet and Lior! Best wishes and looking forward to chatting soon.
It's exciting to have a front-row seat observing such a transformative shift in how the tech community buys and sells solutions. Can't wait to see Amberflo's continued success helping customers enable and optimize usage-based pricing.
What an ingenious idea! Congrats. How do we follow your journey henceforward ?
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@ahmedsaleh thanks for the feedback! you can sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date with all of our blog posts and announcements here: https://www.amberflo.io/blog
How is a Metering Service different from a logging or monitoring service?
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@alexander_wurm Metering is built from the ground up with the principles of accuracy and durability in mind. That is to say, a metering service cannot drop, lose, or not process records. Amberflo is built to ensure accuracy by way of idempotency and data deduplication; each record is processed once and once only. We guarantee this with full event lifecycle visibility (audit trail) from the moment of ingestion to Amberflo.
Observability technologies are built to monitor the system as a whole without capturing and separating usage by customer or instance. To use a metaphor, observability technologies give a 30,000 foot view whereas metering allows you to zoom in to the ground level.
@alexander_wurm Metering === Accurate (Billable) usage instrumentation platform != Product analytics != Observability.
When I try to explain the difference between metering and other forms of usage statistics, I ask “What is the impact if your logs are missing for one hour? What if some misconfiguration caused your Amplitude data to miss 30 minutes?”
But what if your billable usage data is missing an hour? This is a totally different story. Trying to recover and reprocess historical events is very tricky when you first test that pipeline after an incident. And how to guarantee that every event that should be processed is, once and only once? To bill customers on this data it must be correct and auditable at all times.A metering service === Accurate (Billable, Auditable) usage instrumentation platform where the design principles guarantee accuracy (Idempotency and Deduplication built-in) is an emerging infrastructure category that companies (AWS, Snowflake, Twilio, others…) have previously had to build themselves.
@alexander_wurm Thanks Alexander. It's a commonly asked question. And the awareness around how it is different is growing and being appreciated.
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@alexander_wurm There are all kinds of major differences between usage based pricing systems to logging or monitoring. I would say aside from accuracy (which does play a big role here), the main differences are in what you try to measure, how you construct your events, and what kind of applications consume the data of your events.
Logging system events or metrics usually don't have a very defined structure, and can even be just text (pretty much). Also usually those events describe something that happened at some specific point in time.
UBP systems events are to measure customer's usage over time. These specific types of events always have the customer, so everything you measure is related to your customers. Time also plays a big role in this type of events. Unlike logging here we measure a phenomena that happens over a time span, maybe even a long time, or maybe even something that is still happening.
From this we can see that UBP systems events are more structured, and so can be integrated with other applications. For example the pricing and billing systems. Because the events are more structured and contain the customer and the time-span we can use these events to come up with a usage based pricing plan, promotions, prepaid, or pay-as-you-go tools which are solely based on the customer usage.
Last I'll mention that indeed because UBP systems involve pricing and billings (actual money) they are also much safer and accurate than logging systems (in addition to deduplication we also have many mechanisms for making sure billing is reconciled with usage, that usage can be canceled in case bad input was sent to Amberflo, etc).
@bobby_khattri to add to this - all functionality on the platform is API-first. You can extract any data you'd like from the system with no egress fees or additional charges. we'd like to see Amberflo be the system of record/single source of truth for usage and consumption data within customers' orgs, and then have that data be extracted from Amberflo to downstream applications that leverage it, for example BI tools, CRM, or accounting/finance tools, to name a few.
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@bobby_khattri To add to what @lior_mechlovich said, for poc purposes. We can always help you folks convert some file (or other form of data source) you have to Amberflo meters. Then you can have an early view of how your data will look like in Amberflo, and see how it can be converted into statistics or into pricing plans.
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