6 Best Usage-Based Billing Software in 2025 and Beyond

61% of companies adopted usage-based billing in 2023, double from 27% in 2018. The reason is simple: it allows customers to pay only for what they consume, aligning pricing with what customers value.

But implementing usage-based pricing is no small feat — it requires collaboration across finance, engineering, and leadership teams. Poor implementation can lead to revenue leakage, compliance fines, and forecasting inaccuracies. The key to overcoming these challenges lies in choosing the right usage-based billing software, one that aligns with your pricing model, team structure, and business needs.

This guide explores the key challenges of usage-based pricing, must-have features in a billing platform, and a framework for selecting the right solution—so your team can scale efficiently without sacrificing accuracy or agility.

1. Zenskar

Zenskar is an enterprise-grade solution that automates billing, revenue recognition, and SaaS metrics for subscriptions, usage, and hybrid pricing models. It eliminates developer dependencies and manual workarounds so teams can maximize their efficiency.

Its graphical data model and decoupled architecture allow it to handle the complexities of usage-based pricing with ease – unlike the legacy subscription tools that offer limited support for usage-based pricing and the new-age solutions that are developer-first. It can also cater to any industry segment with the most common domains being SaaS, fintech, API, etc.

Offers

• Metering, Usage-based Billing, Revenue Recognition, SaaS metrics, Collections

Built for

• Finance, C-suite, Developers

Pricing

Zenskar’s pricing model can be customized to suit your needs. Regardless of which plan you are on, you get access to all the features and can get unlimited support — be it for migration, implementation, custom development, or integration — without any additional charges. Click here to get a custom quote.

2. Stripe

Stripe has expanded its product suite from payments to billing, revenue recognition, tax, and so on. Originally designed for developers in e-commerce platforms and B2C industries, it handles simple billing use cases and vanilla subscriptions well. It is known to have its limitations in handling complex use cases, finance-ready usability, large teams, or enterprise needs.

Offers

• Usage-based Billing, Revenue Recognition, Payments, Tax

Built for

• Developers

Pricing:

Stripe’s offerings have their own pricing structure, which can lead to unexpected costs and a fragmented experience. Core features like revenue recognition, payment links, and custom checkout pages often require additional add-ons, each with separate fees.

This modular pricing approach can make it difficult to predict overall costs, especially for businesses scaling their billing operations.

For instance, a company with a monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of $100,000 and processing 1,000 transactions monthly, with a 50% international market share, Stripe’s costs quickly add up to $4,950/month.

• Stripe Payments: $3,700 total
  • $1,600 from domestic payments (2.9%)
  • $2,100 from international payments (3.9%)
  • $300 in transaction fees (1,000 × $0.30 per transaction)
• Stripe Billing: $500 (0.5% per transaction, uncapped)
• Stripe Checkout: $500 (0.5% per transaction, uncapped)‍
• Revenue Recognition: $250 (0.25% per transaction)‍
• Total Stripe Fees: $4,950/month

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3. Zuora

Zuora is a leading subscription management platform that offers recurring billing and revenue recognition. In May 2024, it expanded its capabilities to keep up with and better support usage-based pricing by acquiring Togai, an event-based metered billing platform. Zuora advertises to be a good fit for SaaS, manufacturing, IoT, media, and entertainment industries.

Offers

• Billing, Revenue Recognition, Payments

Built for

• Finance 
• Expanding for developers 

Pricing:

According to G2, Zuora’s pricing is 39% more expensive than the average subscription management product. Many Zuora users have also complained its pricing is quite opaque and difficult to estimate. 

According to Vendr, the cost of Zuora depends on the company’s size. 

For billing, it is estimated:

Zuora also offers a dedicated product for managing revenue, which comes with its own pricing structure.

4. Chargebee

Chargebee is a subscription management platform that has recently started supporting usage-based billing. It offers billing, revenue recognition, churn management, and analytics and serves B2B SaaS, e-commerce, e-learning, and other industries.

Offers

• Billing, Revenue Recognition, Analytics, Collections

Built for

• Finance, Developers

Pricing:

Chargebee's pricing can become expensive as your business scales. Its standard plan costs $599/month for up to $100k in monthly billing and then adds a 0.75% fee. You might also need add-ons, which increase the costs. It offers a freemium plan, but sandboxes are supported on enterprise plans only.

5. Maxio

SaaSOptics and Chargify came together in 2022 combining their offerings to form Maxio - a subscription and usage-based billing management platform that automates billing, collections, and reporting. It is a good fit for both B2B and B2C businesses. It offers all the basic features needed for small to medium businesses but the long and complex implementation process makes it a difficult choice.

Pricing:

Maxio's pricing starts at $599 per month for its billing module, a heavy price tag for its feature set. Usage, dunning, collections, etc are reportedly offered as add-ons.

6. BillingPlatform

BillingPlatform is a revenue lifecycle management platform that monetizes any product at any pricing - subscriptions or usage-based pricing. It serves multiple industries, including software, finance, media, transportation and communications.

Pricing:

BillingPlatform’s pricing is customized based on each company's specific requirements, based on factors like transaction volume, feature needs, and integration complexities.

Why is usage-based pricing complex?

Usage-based pricing has extra steps over simple subscriptions that weave complexity into its implementation and maintenance.

1. Identify value metrics: Choose metrics that best reflect your platform's value to your customers.
2. Meter usage data: Measure and store usage data in real time to charge for it.
3. Compute billable metrics: Convert customer usage data such as the number of API calls made or storage used, into chargeable line items.
4. Generate and send invoices: with the appropriate line items and charges to initiate payment.
5. Share usage reports: Give your customers visibility into their usage regularly - either with your invoices or as regular reports.
6. Set usage alerts: Monitor your usage metrics and trigger alerts for potential overages to predict and support variable usage.‍
7. Recognize revenue accurately: Unlike vanilla subscriptions, usage-based charges need more intricate handling to recognize revenue and automate journal entries.

Challenges faced by teams with usage-based pricing

It takes a village to implement usage-based pricing – involving multiple stakeholders across teams. Some of these challenges can be specific to how the teams are structured and interact with one another.

The challenges are also two-fold, one-time implementation challenges and evolving needs of growing teams.

Finance

Manual workarounds and spreadsheets continue to burden finance teams even in the age of AI. Usage-based pricing adds additional complexities to the table:

• Lack the technical know-how to navigate setting up usage-based pricing.
• Inability to access or navigate usage data as needed for invoicing.
• Time-consuming and error-prone manual workarounds.
• Increased reliance on developers to facilitate billing and revenue recognition.
• Revenue recognition is more challenging with varying usage.

Engineering

Engineers often find themselves dragged into billing processes because of the limitations and rigidity of existing tools. This includes:

• Creating complex pricing models or invoice logic on billing tools.
• Metering usage data from internal systems or data warehouses into the billing system.
• Sending raw or aggregate data to the billing system - based on the rate limits and aggregation capabilities.
• Setting up internal monitoring systems in addition to core responsibilities. 
• Sharing usage reports with non-technical teams or directly with customers.
• Integrating the tool with the rest of the financial tech stack - like CRM, payments, ERP, accounting, tax, etc.

All of these cut into the bandwidth that can otherwise be used on core responsibilities, causing delayed product launches and meeting customer needs. 

C-Suite

• Pricing and value: Identifying the right value metric is complex and requires continuous testing.
• Revenue predictability: It is harder to forecast revenue in usage-based pricing models. This can also cause uncertainties in financial planning.
• Cost of resources: Engineering teams spending time on billing and revenue recognition and finance teams spending time on manual workarounds inflate operational costs and make it harder to retain talent.
• Cost of inaccuracies and errors: Revenue leakages or churn due to inaccurate billing
• Cost of non-compliance: Revenue recognition errors can cost companies hefty fines
• Slow decision-making: Spreadsheet-based reporting delays insights and business moves.

Auditors

• Verifying that all metered usage is correctly accounted for without discrepancies. Identifying and preventing discrepancies between reported and actual usage if needed
• Ensuring billing and revenue recognition adhere to legal standards such as ASC 606, IFRS 15, and regional tax laws.
• Ensuring a clear audit trail of usage events, pricing calculations, and invoices.

Must have features of the best usage-based billing software

Billing and revenue are critical functions and require a significant investment of resources. But in a market full of apparent look-alikes, it’s no easy feat to choose a usage-based pricing platform. So we put together a list of key considerations, essentials, and good-to-haves for your solution.

Framework to choose your usage-based pricing software

Framework to choose

• Pricing complexity - Ensure that the platform can support your usage-based pricing model and all its complexities - minimum guarantees, credits, free trials, etc.
• Developer bandwidth - Evaluate how much engineering effort is needed for setup, maintenance, and ongoing customization to avoid diverting resources from core product development.
• Integration needs - Check that the platform is seamlessly compatible with your existing CRM, ERP, payment gateways, and analytics tools of choice.
• Implementation timeline - Evaluate how quickly the solution can be deployed, factoring in metering setup, data migration, and internal training.
• Budget - Asses the total cost of the system, base price including add-ons, transaction fees, plus manual hours of finance team and engineering costs for upkeep.

What to look for in a usage-based pricing software?

1. Automation Capabilities

Most usage-based billing platforms still require manual workarounds for complexities like invoice splits, discounts, and prepaid billing. This creates a growing burden for finance teams.

The best usage-based pricing platform should be able to support all your customizations and billing and revenue recognition capabilities through automated workflows to scale reliably and minimize errors.

2. Pricing experimentation

An effective pricing strategy solidifies your position in the market and helps you meet your business and, more importantly, revenue generation goals. It is one of the influential growth levers - with studies showing that even a 1% increase in pricing can lead to up to an 11% increase in revenue.

3. Accessibility and ease of use

Usage-based billing and revenue involve multiple teams:

• Billing & revenue recognition primarily involves finance teams
• Pricing configuration is shared between product, sales, or C-suite
• Contracts & customizations is for sales
• Usage data metering is usually linked to engineering or product teams

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An ideal usage-based pricing solution should allow a setup where your teams maintain control of the core responsibilities without restricting or depending on each other.

4. Decoupled architecture

Most billing and revenue systems are coupled, meaning tightly integrated modules can create rigidity and limitations.

For example, in a coupled system:

• API-only access forces developers to get involved in every usage-related task.
• A finance operator wanting to check usage against an invoice needs a developer to pull the report or set up access.

With a decoupled architecture, the choice of metering setup does not affect the flow of data or the billing process downstream.

• Developers can own metering without being involved in billing/having to understand the billing system
• Finance team have the freedom to iterate on pricing without changing your metering setup
• Engineers can do any change on database, or metering setup without worrying about breaking billing

5. Revenue recognition

Usage-based pricing makes revenue recognition more complex due to fluctuating usage across billing cycles. Without built-in Revenue recognition module, finance teams rely on spreadsheets, and time-intensive patchwork to recognize revenue—leading to errors and increasing compliance risks

6. Analytics capabilities

Usage data offers a host of other insights that can help forecast revenue, optimize pricing strategies, and identify potential churn risks..

Why Zenskar is the best usage-based pricing software in 2025

Usage-based pricing tools generally fall into two categories:

• Legacy systems: These platforms have been built fot subscriptions. They have tightly coupled metering, billing and revenue systems. Developer intervention can overcome some of the limitations of the system.
• New-age developer-first platforms: These have decoupled architecture, but they offer flexibility primarily through development efforts
  .

Zenskar is built to overcome the challenges of both these categories. It caters equally well for finance and developer segments with no-code, low-code/API-first options for most of the features needed for billing, revenue and analytics.

It has best-in class metering system that is decoupled from pricing and billing. It ingests usage data real-time or in batches with five ingestion methods so teams can choose based on what fits their needs best.

The billing engine works seamlessly for subscriptions, usage or any other hybrid pricing in between. Pricing is stored as objects on a graph which provides ultimate flexibility to configure any intricacy imaginable.

On the user interface, it can be configured via the UI, through a visual plan builder or through API. It also offers unlimited contract flexibility so your sales team can win more deals.

Revenue is also completely decoupled from contracts. Finance teams can easily customize automation rules and adjust revenue schedules separately from billing, giving you maximum flexibility in managing your revenue recognition process.

This flexibility has made Zenskar the platform of choice for several teams that earlier found such a solution inconceivable.

Take an interactive product tour to see us in action. Or, book a custom demo to learn how we can automate your usage-based billing.