"We knew that without a flexible and scalable system for managing pricing and entitlements, we would be stuck, unable to innovate, and ultimately frustrating our customers and sales team. Schematic provided the solution we needed to avoid that nightmare." -- Daniel Chalef, CEO, Zep
Customer Overview
Zep, founded by Daniel Chalef, focuses on solving long-term memory management for large language models (LLMs). The company emerged from Daniel’s personal need to manage state in applications utilizing LLMs. Zep has rapidly gained traction in the market, leveraging its innovative approach to dialog memory and analysis to offer advanced tools for developers.
Before Schematic
Zep knew it would need flexible pricing, usage tracking, and entitlement enforcement — but building this in-house would have pulled engineers off their core product. Daniel had seen how hard it is to get right and knew it wasn’t a priority worth owning.
Challenges:
Lost revenue from untracked usage and unenforced limits.
Frustration from customer and sales teams due to inflexible pricing and being unable to customize the product for larger deals.
Engineering time diverted from core product development.
“I knew from past experience how complex it would be, and doing it right is not a core competency of our business, nor should it be.”
Options
Daniel saw two painful options: abandon Stripe and move to another billing platform, or build the missing pieces himself — entitlements, usage metering, paywalls, admin panels, alerts.
After meeting with Schematic, a better option emerged: implement Schematic between his app & Stripe billing. Stripe would handle invoicing. Schematic would handle entitlements, advanced metering, limit enforcement, paywalls, webhooks & alerts, plans configuration, add-ons, and allow him to easily support hybrid GTM and hybrid billing.
Implementing Schematic
Zep decided to partner with Schematic to address these challenges. The integration process was quick:
Day 1: Trial starts.
Zep Connects Stripe, models plans and entitlements, and starts testing.
Day 4: Goes Live in Production.
Tests Schematic in prod for 3 days and becomes a customer. Schematic proves ultra low latency, high reliability and makes it easy for Zep to turn on overage pricing and track and enforce limits.
Day 7: Converts to annual plan.
Day 30:
All plans are fully powered by Schematic & Daniel is using Schematic to drive free users into pay-as-you go plans and enterprise plans.
With Schematic, Zep could swiftly adapt and innovate with new pricing models without the need for expensive internal development. This partnership allowed them to allocate engineering resources to core product improvements and focus on delivering differentiated value to customers.
“It was really quick. We were able to integrate Schematic into our workflow within a couple of days.”
Outcomes:
Renewed Focus on Core Competency:
Schematic was integrated into Zep’s workflow within a couple of days, minimizing time and cost associated with developing a custom entitlement and billing solution in house.
Limit Enforcement Drives Upgrades:
Zep now has the ability to track usage and enforce limits on their plans. Limit enforcement has been a key driver in converting free users to their paid plans, generating immediate ROI on the Schematic investment.
Smart Usage Notifications:
Beyond enforcing usage limits, Schematic allows Zep to proactively drive expansion in product and power sales outreach based on Customer usage data.
Revenue Insights:
Because Schematic captures revenue and usage data, Zep can now identify and support high-value customers.
“We wouldn't have built something like Schematic. It would have been inflexible, probably hard-coded, and the first time we needed to change pricing or plan structure, we'd end up with a mess."
Value Delivered
Schematic gave Zep the billing infrastructure it needed — without the build time. In days, Zep had hybrid pricing, usage-based limits, and monetization insights. It’s helped them grow faster, with less engineering overhead and more flexibility to experiment.
