The role of billing systems has changed. They’re no longer just about charging customers — they now shape how products are packaged, sold, and delivered. Many leading companies, including Vercel and OpenAI, now have dedicated billing engineering teams. Not because billing is core to their product, but because doing it well takes sustained engineering investment.
Pricing models and sales motions have both evolved. Teams now combine seat-based pricing with usage-based or credit-based models, and they sell through a mix of founder-led, product-led, enterprise, channel, and OEM motions. Billing systems that once supported a single model and sales path now need to accommodate a much wider range of packaging, contracts, and customer experiences. Billing infrastructure must make that possible, without relying on custom logic or one-off exceptions.
For many teams, the combination of hybrid pricing and hybrid sales creates real complexity in how monetization is managed, and that complexity typically falls on product and engineering. It’s hard to manage, partly because there aren’t well-defined patterns for implementing pricing and packaging, and partly because most billing systems don’t abstract the problem at the right level. They don’t define how features map to plans, or how usage limits are enforced in the product.
The result is a lot of time spent on billing infrastructure instead of core product work. As Andy Barker, Head of Growth at Pagos, puts it: “If we had to build it ourselves, it might be a three, four-month project where we wouldn't be focusing on new capabilities for our customers.”
Customers also expect more: clear usage breakdowns, self-serve plan management, and consistent access controls across what they’re paying for. Meeting those expectations requires billing systems that are deeply integrated with both product logic and go-to-market operations.
The article begins by outlining what a modern billing platform needs to support, then looks at how go-to-market teams apply those capabilities in practice.
A modern billing platform does more than generate invoices. It provides the infrastructure to control access, track usage, and price products accurately. At a minimum, that includes:
Entitlements — defining which features a customer can use
Metering — tracking usage of things like API calls, seats, or compute
Pricing models — supporting seat-based, usage-based, credit-based, and hybrid pricing
These capabilities form the foundation for any billing system built to support modern packaging and pricing strategies.
At its core, an entitlement is a rule about what a customer can or cannot do in your product. These rules generally fall into two categories:
Boolean entitlements — simple on/off flags for access to a feature (e.g., “Has access to advanced exports”)
Quantity-based entitlements — limits tied to usage (e.g., “Up to 10 seats,” “100,000 API calls per month,” or “500 AI conversations”)
Entitlements are usually tied to the customer’s subscription or contract, and they define the version of the product the customer experiences.
For example, a customer on the “Pro” plan might have access to 10 custom dashboards, priority support, and a usage limit of 100,000 API calls per month. Each of these is an entitlement tied to the plan. When the customer upgrades to “Enterprise,” the entitlements change: more dashboards, higher limits, and new features unlock automatically.
In many systems, this logic is scattered. Some of it lives in billing. Some in application code. Some in spreadsheets. This creates inconsistency, and makes it difficult to answer simple questions like “what does this customer have access to?” or “what happens if they upgrade?”
Modern billing systems treat entitlements as first-class data. That means they:
Define access rules at the feature level
Associate those rules with plans, SKUs, or contracts
Expose that data via API or SDK so it can be enforced directly in the product
Make it easy to inspect or override entitlements when needed
This structure creates a single source of truth. Product behavior reflects what’s in the customer’s plan. Support teams can quickly see what’s enabled. Upgrades and downgrades work as expected. And billing stays aligned with what customers actually use.
As pricing models move toward usage-based or hybrid approaches, billing systems need a reliable way to track how much of a resource a customer has consumed. This is the role of metering.
Metering involves recording discrete usage events — like API calls, seats provisioned, messages sent, or gigabytes stored — and aggregating that data in a way that can inform pricing, enforce limits, and provide visibility.
Without a centralized metering system, usage tracking tends to fragment. One team logs events for analytics. Another counts usage for billing. A third manages in-product rate limits. These systems often drift out of sync, making it hard to answer questions like:
How much has this customer used?
Are they approaching or exceeding their plan limits?
What should we charge them at the end of the month?
A modern billing platform provides a single system of record for usage. It should:
Define usage metrics clearly (e.g., “monthly active users,” “documents generated,” “compute time”)
Track usage in real time or near-real time
Associate usage with customer plans and pricing
Support thresholds, overage pricing, or enforcement rules
Expose usage data to internal teams and customers
For example, a customer’s plan might include 100,000 API calls per month, with $0.05 per call beyond that. The billing system needs to track each call, calculate the total, and optionally enforce a hard limit — all while making that data available to support, finance, and the customer themselves.
When metering is handled well, pricing stays aligned with product usage, customers understand what they’re paying for, and internal teams have fewer surprises.
Modern software pricing takes many forms, and often combines multiple models within a single plan. A billing system needs to be flexible enough to support a variety of approaches without requiring significant custom logic.
Some common models include:
Seat-based — Pricing based on the number of users or collaborators (e.g. $20 per seat per month)
Usage-based — Pricing tied to consumption of a metered resource (e.g. $0.01 per API call)
Credit-based — Prepaid units that are burned down over time (e.g. 10,000 credits per month, used for AI jobs or compute)
Hybrid — A mix of the above, often with a base fee plus usage or credits (e.g. $99/month + $0.10 per GB stored)
These models may be priced differently, enforced differently, and surfaced differently to customers. But they all need to work together in a coherent, predictable way.
Without flexible billing primitives, teams often hardcode pricing logic into application code or resort to manual overrides in their billing tools. This makes it hard to test new pricing, support edge cases, or iterate on packaging over time.
A modern billing platform needs to:
Model each pricing structure directly — without needing to hardcode logic or manage plan logic in spreadsheets
Compose models together — so you can combine seats, usage, and credits within a single plan
Apply different billing rules to different usage metrics — for example, one metered feature might be included in the base plan, while another triggers overages
Support multiple pricing schemes — including tiered or volume pricing, where the per-unit cost changes based on how much the customer consumes
The ability to support flexible pricing isn’t just about monetization — it’s about reducing engineering overhead and enabling faster go-to-market changes.
Once the foundations are in place — entitlements, metering, and flexible pricing models — GTM teams can start to take ownership of packaging, pricing, and customer operations. Modern billing platforms enable non-engineering teams to move faster, with more precision and less reliance on manual processes or custom logic.
The following sections highlight three areas where GTM teams benefit most:
GTM flexibility and faster pricing iteration — launching and updating plans without shipping code
Support for sales-led deals and exceptions — offering custom terms without billing debt
Visibility for customers and internal teams — exposing entitlements and usage to reduce confusion and support volume
Pricing decisions rarely originate with engineering, but they often depend on it. Whether it's launching a new plan, adjusting usage thresholds, or running an A/B test on packaging, many companies still require developer time to make even basic changes.
Modern billing infrastructure removes that bottleneck. By structuring pricing logic and entitlements as configuration instead of code, go-to-market teams can move faster and experiment more safely. That might mean creating plan variants for specific segments, offering usage-based and seat-based options side-by-side, or adjusting thresholds without requiring a redeploy.
This flexibility is especially important in early-stage or fast-changing products, where pricing evolves quickly and experiments are part of the go-to-market motion. Without it, pricing iteration becomes slow, risky, and expensive.
Modern billing platforms give GTM teams the ability to:
Create and launch new plans without engineering support
Combine pricing models (e.g. seats + usage) through configuration
Run pricing or packaging experiments with minimal overhead
Set region-, segment-, or customer-specific pricing without duplicating logic
Migrate or retire plans without breaking entitlements or usage tracking
The result is faster iteration, tighter feedback loops, and less engineering time spent implementing pricing decisions — which is exactly where most teams want to be.
Most real-world pricing doesn’t fit neatly into predefined plans. Sales teams make exceptions. Customer success grants temporary extensions. Enterprise accounts negotiate custom terms. Without the right systems in place, these edge cases often turn into billing debt: hardcoded overrides, fragile spreadsheets, or one-off logic scattered across tools.
Modern billing infrastructure should treat exceptions as a first-class part of the model, not something to work around. That means supporting overrides to usage limits, pricing, or entitlements in a way that’s structured, auditable, and doesn’t break the connection between what the customer was promised and what they actually receive.
With this kind of infrastructure in place, modern GTM teams are empowered to:
Grant or restrict feature access outside of the standard plan
Set custom usage limits or thresholds for a specific customer
Apply negotiated pricing or discounts at the contract level
Track overrides centrally so support and sales know what’s in effect
Maintain alignment between product behavior and billing even with exceptions
This is especially important in sales-led motions, where flexibility is often the key to closing deals, but flexibility without structure creates long-term maintenance problems. A modern billing platform helps teams support edge cases cleanly, without breaking the system for everyone else.
Understanding what a customer has access to, and how much they’re using, is a common need across support, success, sales, and product teams. Without reliable billing infrastructure, this data is often hard to find, inconsistent, or incomplete. Entitlements may live in application logic, usage in a data warehouse, and plan information in a CRM, with no clear source of truth across systems.
Customers face the same problem. They want to know what features are included in their plan, how close they are to usage limits, and what options are available if they need more. In PLG-driven products especially, this visibility is critical to reducing friction and driving upgrades.
For example, a user on a free tier might hit a usage-based limit — like monthly message sends or compute time — and be shown an upgrade prompt. That interaction only works if the billing system can surface accurate usage data and map it to upgrade logic in the product.
Clear visibility into usage and entitlements enables GTM teams to:
See exactly what a customer has access to, and what limits apply
Understand how usage is trending over time, at both the account and feature level
Proactively surface upgrade opportunities or overage risks
Expose usage and entitlements directly to customers through in-app billing views
Reduce support volume by making plan and usage data self-serve
This kind of visibility improves both customer experience and operational efficiency. It reduces guesswork, shortens support interactions, and makes it easier for teams to align on what each customer is entitled to, and how to best serve them.
As pricing strategies become more dynamic and products grow more complex, billing infrastructure plays a central role in go-to-market execution. It’s no longer just about invoicing, it's now about keeping packaging, usage, and customer experience in sync.
Modern teams need systems that can adapt, scale, and support both product- and sales-led growth. The companies investing in this foundation now are the ones that will be able to move faster, support more flexible business models, and meet rising customer expectations, without trading off speed or stability.
Modern billing infrastructure is more than a backend system — it directly shapes how products are packaged, priced, and delivered. The core capabilities every billing platform should provide include:
Entitlements — defining what customers can access and enforcing those rules in the product
Metering — tracking usage of key features and tying it to plan limits and pricing
Pricing model support — enabling flexible combinations of seats, usage, credits, and hybrid plans
When these systems are in place, GTM teams are able to:
Launch and iterate on plans without engineering bottlenecks
Offer custom pricing and packaging without introducing billing debt
Provide clear visibility to customers and internal teams to reduce confusion and support overhead
Schematic gives teams this foundation out of the box, so billing works like infrastructure, not a long-running internal project.
What exactly counts as an entitlement? Entitlements define what a customer can access in your product. They can be boolean (e.g., access to a feature) or usage-based (e.g., up to 100 seats or 1M API calls). A modern system tracks and enforces these consistently across plans and customers.
Why not just handle entitlements in product code? Hardcoding entitlements leads to drift between billing and product behavior. Centralizing them keeps your packaging consistent and makes it easier to support upgrades, downgrades, and exceptions.
What does a billing platform need to meter? Anything that maps to usage-based pricing — API calls, compute time, active users, AI jobs, etc. Metering should be real-time (or close) and tied directly to plans, pricing, and enforcement logic.
Can’t we just track usage in our data warehouse? You can, but data warehouses aren’t built for real-time enforcement or billing logic. A proper metering layer gives you accuracy, consistency, and immediate visibility — without stitching together multiple systems.
What kinds of pricing models should a billing system support? At a minimum: seat-based, usage-based, credit-based, and hybrid combinations. You should be able to compose these together per plan — without writing custom billing logic every time.
Why does model flexibility matter so much? Because pricing evolves. If your system can’t handle different models, you’ll be stuck rebuilding billing logic every time your go-to-market team wants to test or launch something new.
How does modern billing help teams move faster? By putting pricing and packaging changes in the hands of GTM teams — no deploys, no code. This lets you launch plans, run experiments, and support new packaging strategies without pulling in engineering every time.
Can non-technical teams really manage pricing safely? Yes, if the system is built right. Structured pricing and entitlements let non-engineers configure plans confidently, without risking billing or product breakage.
Who benefits from better visibility into billing data? Support, sales, customer success, and the customer. Everyone needs to know what a customer has access to, what they’re using, and what’s next. Visibility reduces friction across the board.
How does visibility impact product-led growth? When usage and limits are transparent, customers know when they’re outgrowing a plan — and can upgrade without talking to sales. That drives better conversion and a smoother customer experience.
What’s the best way to handle custom deals or exceptions? Use structured overrides — not one-off logic. A modern billing platform lets you customize pricing, limits, or feature access for a single customer without introducing billing debt.
Do exceptions break the standard pricing model? Not if they’re managed properly. The goal is flexibility with control — enabling sales-led deals without compromising the integrity of your billing system.
