Usage Metering

Usage Metering

The only metering solution with built-in data integration tools so you can track customer usage to facilitate accurate, fair, and transparent billing, and provide insights about service usage.

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Your billing system’s best friend

Meter Anything

Active users, storage consumed, compute time, API calls… Define your consumption metrics to measure what you want and Usage Metering by DigitalRoute will meter it to provide an accurate, rich and timely record to your financial system.

Agile Metering

Your business, your choice. Choose between an API-first approach or the use of our graphical environment to define your meter types. Or a combination of both, so you lessen your dependency on engineering teams and can roll out experiments faster.

All-in-one metering

Manage your usage data without the need for third-party integrations such as ETL or iPaaS tools. Usage Metering by DigitalRoute can ingest data in various ways and ensure data quality by performing data correction and de-duplication before providing it to your billing system.

FAQ

  • What is usage metering?

    Usage Metering helps as-a-service companies to launch and optimize usage-based pricing by providing accurate and detailed usage summary records to the billing system, without the need to replace existing billing or other systems. It also supports companies who want to introduce or optimize prepaid business models by tracking and enforcing usage entitlements.

    It’s the method used in business models where customers are charged based on their usage of a product or service. Commonly, metering is used in industries and markets such as cloud computing, streaming services, mobility, software as a service (SaaS), utilities and telecommunications. However, more and more industries and businesses are shifting to offer their products and services based on consumption or outcomes, where metering is an essential function.

    In the digital world, especially with SaaS and cloud services, usage metering tracks the number of active users, storage consumed, compute time, or other metrics that measure how much of the service is being used. Many cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure operate with this model, where you pay for what you use.

    Whereas, in a utility model, for example, customers are billed for the amount of electricity, water, or gas they consume. For telecommunications, charges may be based on the amount of data used, minutes of call time, or number of text messages sent.

  • Why usage metering in SaaS

    Anyone looking at offering consumption-based billing, whether you are offering a SaaS digital service or doing product-as-a-service, will for sure need a metering solution.

    But also, anyone who is doing subscription today and is ready to go to the next step: to launch hybrid models for instance, to better understand usage to improve customer experience, or to enforce limits and entitlements to preserve margins and trigger upsell: metering is also a great foundation for such projects.

  • What are the core features of Usage Metering by DigitalRoute?

    Usage metering provides easy-to-integrate APIs and out-of-the-box components which let users create a metering solution based on the business case with a low-code experience.

    · Meter types: Meter type is used to define the billing product or service which is to be metered periodically. Meter type need certain essential details along with aggregation type (Sum up, count, min and max). The aggregation type defines what metering operation to perform for all meters of this type. Meter types can be managed both via API and UI.

    · Meter: A meter is defined as a bucket where the usage data is measured for a user or an asset. A meter is created via API once a user or asset enrolls for a certain meter type.

    · Inspection: Inspect individual or multiple meters to check their current state using a UI or API, for easy troubleshooting. The UI also allows quick search to get all meters for a particular user and check their consumption. This is beneficial for customer support when catering to a request concerning an individual user/asset.

    · Note: Editing the meter value via UI or API is not permitted in this phase.

    · Ingestion: Ingest data with all available collectors in Cloud edition. For example, using the Amazon S3 collector, or the HTTP server collector which supports API requests.

Competitor comparison

How does DigitalRoute compare to the competition?

There are many ways to manage service usage data, but DigitalRoute provides the only battle-proven solution on the market today. Take a closer look at how we stack up to other solutions.

DigitalRoute vs. homegrown solution

A homegrown solution for usage billing may seem fast and low-cost at first, but over time, it can take a lot of work to maintain and can hinder your potential to scale.

DigitalRoute vs. iPaaS integration tools

When you charge customers based on usage, you must aggregate metering data over time. That requires state management, something most iPaaS solutions cannot do.

DigitalRoute vs. ETL integration tools

ETLs are designed for bulk data transfer scenarios, such as disaster recovery, database backups and data warehousing. But adapting them for usage billing can come at a high cost.

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