Metronome

Metronome is a usage-based billing platform founded in San Francisco in November 2019 by Scott Woody and Kevin Liu. It raised $128 million in total, the last round a $50 million Series C led by NEA in February 2025 with a16z, General Catalyst, Workday Ventures and Activant participating. Stripe agreed to buy the company in December 2025 and completed the acquisition on January 14, 2026, at a price Payments Dive and Upstarts Media put near $1 billion, though neither side confirmed terms. Stripe's own announcement names OpenAI, Anthropic and NVIDIA as companies running on Metronome's metering engine. That is unusually direct confirmation of a customer list most billing vendors only hint at. Metronome adds Databricks and Confluent, and says it bills for more than 150 million end users. Patrick Collison described Stripe as integrating those capabilities with the Stripe Billing platform, so the standalone roadmap is now Stripe's roadmap.

Pricing and how it works

Metronome is the rare platform in this category that puts a number on the page. The self-serve Starter plan bills 0.8% of the invoice volume you run through it plus $0.04 per 1,000 ingested events, with no separate platform fee listed. Invoice $200,000 a month and you pay around $1,600 in volume fees before event charges. The Custom tier is quoted, and it adds Salesforce and NetSuite, invoicing through the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces, data warehouse and BI exports, a dedicated account manager and stronger SLAs. Both tiers include real-time metering, billable metrics defined in SQL, enterprise contract handling with commitments, amendments and true-ups, and 34-day event backdating. The percentage is charged on money you bill, not money Metronome moves. It stacks on top of whatever your card processor already takes.

Who it is for

This is infrastructure for companies whose revenue is measured in tokens, GPU seconds, API calls or rows scanned, and whose largest contracts are negotiated agreements rather than credit-card self-serve. The event pipeline is built for billions of events a month, and the contract model handles multi-year commitments and true-ups properly, which is why the frontier AI labs ended up here. Small teams are the wrong fit. Reviewers report consistently that configuration takes longer than planned and needs SQL fluency. Metronome also does not cover feature gating, entitlement enforcement or credit expiry.

What Metronome is not

Metronome is not a merchant account, an acquirer or a merchant of record. It never underwrites you, never holds your funds and never assumes tax liability. You bring your own Stripe account. When a billing period closes, Metronome writes the invoice into Stripe, Stripe charges the card or the ACH mandate, and payment status syncs back. Invoices can also route to QuickBooks, NetSuite, Bill and the three cloud marketplaces. Third-party analysts flag that Metronome carries no built-in currency conversion and no regional price books, so multi-currency selling needs logic you write yourself. Compare it with Orb, Lago and Zuora, not with processors.