Today I’m excited to announce our investment in m3ter. The company is building a Pricing Operations Platform to help software companies successfully operationalise modern usage-based pricing strategies.

The current economic environment is putting more emphasis on margins and efficiency with pricing being one of the most effective commercial levers.

Beyond this, there are a number of drivers behind the growth in usage based pricing specifically. Customers like the price they pay to be better aligned to value. Infrastructure companies, like AWS and Google Cloud, charge this way creating a pull down the value chain. And the rise of product led growth and customer success capability is leading to more land and expand sales strategies that work better with usage based pricing.

The old one-size-fits-all pricing models are looking increasingly obsolete and complexity is growing. But the infrastructure and tools needed to enable this complexity have not been built.

According to data from Openview, 61% of SaaS companies will have adopted some form of usage based pricing by the end of 2023; and a further 21% expect to test it at some stage. That is more than 80% of the market. And SaaS is predicted to reach 70% of the total software industry by 2025, meaning the majority of the entire industry will be deploying some form of usage based pricing within a couple of years.

This is the size of the opportunity for m3ter. Their technology enables SaaS companies of all stages to power every variation of usage-based pricing. It plugs directly into existing systems to capture granular usage, pricing, and account data at scale, and then flexibly applies pricing configuration (of any complexity) to calculate error-free bill items in near real-time. 

This data feeds systems throughout the stack, including the billing and finance system (to automate billing operations and eliminated revenue leakage), the SaaS product itself (to deliver billing dashboards to end customers), and Sales CRM and Customer Success platforms (to allow tailored sales deals as well as well-informed and timely conversations with existing customers).

Moving forwards the company will be the aggregator for all usage, cost and pricing related data. There is huge strategic value in this position. m3ter will be able to provide valuable insights and analysis on a customer by customer basis. They will be able to recommend pricing based on specific parameters or objectives. Customers will also be able to model pricing based on current customer usage to understand the impact to revenues and margin.

Griffin Parry and John Griffin’s (the two co-founders) previous company was acquired by AWS who are undoubtedly one of the leading practitioners of usage based pricing. They learnt alot from this experience and could also see how most companies would simply not have the time and resources to build their own pricing infrastructure. 

Griff and John have a clear vision for how the market will evolve and how m3ter will play a leading role in this transition. They are also laying very solid foundations for the business in terms of the quality of the team, the product and deep engagement and alignment with their early customers and partners. 

We are very excited to be joining Griff and John on this journey, and believe that m3ter has a very bright future ahead.

Why Notion? A note from the founders…

"Notion fits perfectly with m3ter because of their deep expertise in B2B SaaS. This is our home but also our target market, and Notion shares our conviction in the opportunities to provide enabling infrastructure and tools to the sector". John Griffin, co-founder/CRO

"We wanted to work with the Notion team because they have deep operator experience and know how to build successful global companies from a European base. But more than that, their decency and integrity shine through, and that matters a lot to us." Griffin Parry, co-founder/CEO