Syrto is a financial intelligence platform for finding and understanding companies and markets. Banks, consultancies, and private equity firms use it to pull financials, ownership structures, and proprietary scores on any company. Its newest product, Syrto AI, is an MCP server that brings that data inside Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude.
Pietro Fariello, CTO, sat down with us to talk about what it took to monetize an MCP server when the billing logic for the main product lived inside a contractor's custom web app.
Billing was hardcoded
Syrto's platform was developed with billing and entitlement logic built into the custom web app. Launching Syrto AI meant getting billing and entitlements in-house and unified across both products. Pietro and Syrto's chief architect share a rule: do not build anything that is not the core product unless you absolutely have to. So they went looking for a platform.
They shopped for billing. They needed entitlements.
Syrto talked with Metronome, Orb, and Chargebee, and realized none of them did what the team wanted. They were not looking for a billing platform after all. They were looking for an entitlement platform: no entitlement databases to manage, no webhooks, no logic about what it means to entitle.
My assumption, knowing nothing of the industry, was that billing and entitlement would have been the same thing, because why would they be different? You're measuring what the users do and what they can do, and you bill them for it. In that sense, I think they are going to converge.
Schematic versus building it
Asked whether Schematic won the evaluation, Pietro pushed back on the framing.
I would describe it as essentially the only choice. It's Schematic versus, in my opinion, being dumb and building it. I know companies that are putting so much development work into their billing platforms. Why? You shouldn't build anything that isn't your product.
No room for billing mistakes
Italy raises the stakes on getting billing right. Every invoice Syrto sends goes through the government's e-invoicing system, which then delivers it to the recipient, so every invoice is tracked countrywide. That shaped how carefully the team approached the transition.
Every invoice we send has to be right. There is no going back. Once it's sent, it's sent.
Next: self-serve and a product that sells itself
Syrto is sales-led today. To convince a customer to change, you need to give them everything they have today plus something, and custom plans pile up. Self-serve is simpler: a handful of plans, customers managing their own billing, far fewer variables. Enabling it was the other reason Syrto got Schematic.
We hope to get it more product-led. My goal is to get it entirely product-led. If the product sells itself, I've done my job correctly.
Watch the full conversation: How Syrto AI monetized their MCP.