How usage-based models, AI, and intelligent infrastructure are redefining SaaS monetisation at scale.
Griffin, your journey from building GameSparks to leading m3ter shows a pattern of solving real-world problems through innovation. What originally sparked your interest in tackling the complexities of SaaS monetisation?
My direct experience of managing usage-based pricing at scale was the spark. At GameSparks and later at AWS, my co-founder John and I saw just how painful it was to manage usage-based pricing at scale. We were trying to solve problems ourselves because no vendor solutions were available, and what we had was cobbled together, fragile, and hard to maintain. That gap was too big to ignore. So rather than wait for someone else to solve it, we decided to tackle it head-on by building m3ter. It wasn’t just about spotting a market opportunity, it was about solving a problem we’d already been living with.
Research from Zylo shows that in 2025, enterprises are running an average of 275 SaaS applications, and spending on these platforms has hit new highs, with the SaaS market projected to reach $300 billion globally this year. All this revenue needs to be billed, and wherever pricing is complex or usage-based there will be pain. That gap we spotted is an increasingly pressing issue.
Usage-based pricing has evolved from niche to norm in just a few years. What’s driving this rapid adoption, and where do you think most companies still get it wrong?
Several forces converge, but AI is the primary driver. AI is strongly associated with usage-based pricing, partly because of how customers want to use AI features, but also because of the costs of delivering them – they tend to generate variable costs to the provider, and so usage-based pricing helps that provider control margins.
And obviously AI is everywhere right now – 95% of companies are projected to adopt AI-powered SaaS apps by 2025, and generative AI now considered transformative by more than 40% of industry leaders.
Usage-based and hybrid pricing models have surged: 78% of companies with usage-based pricing adopted it within the last five years. Companies typically underestimate the operational demands – they try to make do with existing systems that are built for simple subscriptions.
One area where companies get it wrong is thinking it’s just about billing. It’s not. It’s about the entire revenue stack – if you have usage-based pricing then your sales systems, finance systems, and productions systems need to be tightly coupled, as they are in ‘usage-native’ verticals like telco. You need to process usage data, bring it together with account and pricing data from your sales systems, deliver bill calculations in real time to multiple destinations and stakeholders, and be able to change things easily. Too often, people bolt usage pricing onto systems that weren’t designed for it and then wonder why it breaks. It’s a strategic shift, not just a tech integration.
m3ter positions itself not as a billing platform but as a monetisation infrastructure layer. What does that distinction mean in practice for SaaS businesses?
It means we’re not just helping you send invoices – we’re helping you design and operationalise the way your business makes money. In practice, that looks like plugging into your production systems to capture real-time usage data, applying complex pricing logic from your CRM, feeding accurate data into your ERP for billing, and distributing data about usage and billing to wherever else it’s needed around your business.
We sit at the heart of that ecosystem, making sure everything talks to each other and works reliably. That’s why we call it monetisation infrastructure, it’s foundational, not peripheral.
With so many companies operating at scale, where does revenue leakage typically occur—and how does m3ter help surface and solve these blind spots?
Revenue leakage usually creeps in where systems don’t align – usage data doesn’t get captured properly, pricing rules aren’t updated, or billing calculation mechanisms can’t handle edge cases. It’s especially common when companies scale, become operationally more complex, and outgrow their early infrastructure. m3ter helps by establishing a solid control environment and eliminating the problems at source, via peformant usage data processing, automated connections between quote-to-cash systems, and a highly configurable pricing engine that can handle all those edge cases.
Integration without disruption is a strong theme in m3ter’s value proposition. How does your platform embed into legacy systems like ERPs and CRMs without requiring an overhaul?
We built m3ter to meet customers where they are. Most of our customers are running Salesforce, NetSuite, SAP, you name it. So, we designed our platform to integrate deeply but flexibly. It’s not about ripping out what’s already there; it’s about stitching into it intelligently. That’s why we’re investing heavily in our specialist quote-to-cash iPaaS product, internally called mesh. It enables our customers to build and manage multi-step, automated dataflows between production, sales, and billing systems. In the early days, integrations were a source of friction for m3ter, but now they’ve become a powerful feature.
Pricing is often treated as a back-office function. How are your customers rethinking it as a lever for competitive advantage, and what role does data play in that shift?
Our forward-thinking customers see pricing as one of their biggest levers for growth. They’re moving it from the back office to the boardroom. This is mostly about mindset, but data is also a key factor because once you are tracking usage effectively, it becomes much easier to experiment with different pricing applied to that usage.
With m3ter, they can see how different pricing strategies perform, test new models, and iterate fast. It turns pricing from a static decision into a dynamic capability. And in competitive markets, that agility can be the difference between winning and losing.
Hybrid pricing models are gaining ground across enterprise software. What operational or technical hurdles do companies face when trying to implement them effectively?
Hybrid models – where you combine flat fees with usage or tiered pricing – are powerful, but they’re also operationally complex. The key risk is fragmentation. Most companies already have systems that work for flat fees, and the temptation when moving to hybrid is to add an ancillary system to process the usage elements. But that results in spaghetti logic and manual workarounds. m3ter is give them a flexible architecture that can handle those combinations cleanly and scale with them as they evolve.
You’ve worked with businesses at every scale—from startups to AWS. What consistent monetisation challenges have you observed across stages, and how has that informed m3ter’s product roadmap?
The consistent challenge is managing complexity without losing control. Startups want to move fast and test pricing models. Enterprises want governance and scale. Everyone wants accuracy and visibility. So, we’ve built m3ter to flex across those needs. You can start with a single metered product and grow to thousands of SKUs with multiple pricing variants. That scalability is baked into the product because we’ve seen how painful it is to outgrow your monetisation stack.
As AI reshapes every layer of SaaS infrastructure, how is m3ter planning to leverage intelligent automation in pricing and billing strategy going forward?
Although we’re most interested in what AI means for how software companies price their products, we’re also enthusiastic users of Gen AI, Agentic AI, and statistical ML ourselves. We’re investing in intelligent automation to help companies forecast usage, detect anomalies, automatically configure pricing, or design optimal pricing strategies based on observed behaviour. Over time, we see m3ter evolving into an intelligent monetisation infrastructure that processes usage and billing data and helps make smarter decisions.
Looking beyond billing, what’s your broader vision for “data infrastructure for monetisation,” and how do you see it shaping the next decade of SaaS growth?
Our vision goes way beyond billing. We want to be the core infrastructure that powers how companies design, deploy, and scale their monetisation strategies. We’re the missing data infrastructure and integration layer that makes the CRM, the ERP, and the production systems ‘automagically’ work for complex pricing. And it’s intelligent infrastructure – we have both the data and the injection points to nourish the entire system.
Monetisation should be as strategic as product or marketing. The winners will be the ones who build that capability deeply into their DNA – and we want m3ter to be the platform they build it on.
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