What does it really take to build world-class billing and monetization systems inside a high-growth SaaS company?

In this episode of Monetizing SaaS, Fynn talks with Kevin Gruneberg, the billing engineering lead behind Supabase’s pricing architecture, about the complexity, modularity, and commercial impact of billing infrastructure.

You’ll learn:

• Why billing engineering has emerged as its own discipline in modern SaaS

• The critical components of a monetization system: entitlements, metering, pricing, invoicing, usage insights, payments, fraud handling

• Why most teams hardcode monetization early—and deeply regret it later

• How billing choices touch every part of the org: sales, product, finance, engineering, customer success

• Why billing, like auth, should be modular from day one

• How Supabase scaled billing across millions of users and 150+ countries

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⏳Chapters

00:00 – Intro: The accidental billing engineer

02:00 – Early billing systems: subscription logic, fraud, and physical goods

06:45 – How Kevin landed at Supabase

10:51 – Why billing engineering exists

14:00 – The rise of hybrid pricing and its consequences

18:00 – Why billing is high-stakes and cross-cutting21:00 – SKU sprawl and empowered buyers

25:00 – Supabase’s billing architecture

32:00 – Downgrades, payment failures, and service restrictions

36:00 – Entitlements: tightly coupled and hard to fix

42:00 – The startup dilemma: why refactoring billing hurts so bad

46:00 – What startups get wrong about billing systems

50:00 – A vision for modular, flexible monetization infrastructure

55:00 – Final thoughts: treating monetization like product infrastructure