Category: Embedded Revenue Infrastructure

Reclaim Your Roadmap: Why In-House Usage Rating & Billing Logic Might Be Stalling Product Innovation

Posted on July 17, 2025 by Sean Joyce - Consumption-Based Pricing, Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, Usage-Based Pricing

Intro

Customers choose your product for the value your features deliver—not for the billing engine under the hood. While building usage rating and billing logic can initially offer control and flexibility, as complexity grows and new pricing models are introduced, engineering teams often find themselves burdened by ongoing maintenance of credit logic and billing rules.

After all, who knows your usage better than you? It seems logical to leverage that insight internally, especially when usage data also supports analytics, operations, and customer insights.

But what often starts as a well-intentioned and logical choice to maintain control can, as your business scales and product offerings evolve, introduce hidden complexity. Prepaid credits, tiered pricing, and sophisticated overage rules can turn initial flexibility into a significant drain on engineering time, focus, and resources, pulling them away from the innovations that truly set your product apart.

Tuning Your Custom Usage Rating and Billing Engine

For companies who’ve already invested in in-house rating and billing, the goal isn’t always a full rip-and-replace. It’s about optimizing your investment and strategically shifting additional complexity from your core product so you can scale more easily, move faster, and free engineers to build the capabilities that differentiate you.

Even well-built, custom usage rating and billing logic often encounters increasing friction as businesses scale and innovate:

Expertise Shortfall: Accurate usage-rating, billing, and revenue recognition rely on nuanced finance rules, tax regulations, and compliance standards. As new tiers or credit models emerge, keeping up with edge cases (proration, true-ups, audit trails) can become a specialist’s job, not a feature team’s.
On-Going Maintenance: Every pricing tweak—new discount tier, updated overage rate, expired credit pool—translates into code changes and QA cycles. That steady upkeep can quietly consume cycles meant for customer-facing innovation.
Fragile Integrations: Custom connections to Salesforce, NetSuite, or your own analytics stack can break when data models or schemas shift—leading to mismatches that require urgent fixes.
Performance Degradation: Running core revenue logic inside your application can introduce additional CPU, I/O, or network calls—potentially adding latency to user transactions and affecting overall system responsiveness, impacting the very experience your product aims to deliver.
Growing Technical Debt: Quick-win patches for one-off pricing or usage rules often become permanent fixtures. Over time, those patches form a web of interdependencies that slows every release, making your codebase harder to manage and evolve.
Roadmap Slowdown: When usage and billing logic is deeply embedded in your product, every update carries the risk of unintended side effects on rating or billing. This can significantly drag down feature velocity and delay crucial product roadmap items.
Audit & Compliance Overhead: Ensuring every transaction and revenue event is auditable and compliant with financial regulations (like SOX) requires complex logging and reconciliation, pulling engineers into non-feature work.

The good news? For many, the path forward isn’t necessarily a full rip-and-replace of existing systems. Instead, it’s about strategically offloading the operational complexities that slow you down, allowing you to optimize your current investment while reclaiming valuable engineering cycles.

Unlock Agility with Embedded Revenue Infrastructure

Instead of grappling with operational complexity in your product, shift it into a specialized layer that seamlessly plugs into the tools your teams already use. Embedded Revenue Infrastructure empowers you to:

Centralize metering and rating in a purpose-built service, keeping complex usage rating and billing logic out of your product code
Configure pricing models via UI, empowering non-technical teams to add or tweak usage tiers, prepaid credits, and rate plans without a single line of code.
Surface real-time usage insights directly in Salesforce, eliminating manual exports, custom integrations, and the delays of spreadsheet gymnastics.
Automate credit burn and revenue events through APIs, moving beyond manual scripts and batch jobs to ensure accuracy and efficiency.
Free engineers to focus on shipping features that truly propel your product forward and delight customers.

By strategically moving this logic out of your product codebase, you accelerate feature delivery, scale reliably, and eliminate the hidden costs of managing homegrown billing and rating.

Modern usage rating, billing, and overage management should always accelerate product velocity, not stall it. When facing complex pricing models—like prepaid credits, hybrid plans, or multi-phase commitments—the critical question for Product and Engineering leadership becomes: What logic is truly strategic to our core product, and what is operational infrastructure that pulls engineers away from building differentiating features? Your engineers need to focus on delivering that core innovation, not patching metering pipelines or maintaining invoicing scripts.

Ready to reclaim engineering time and scale without revenue headaches?

Schedule a personalized demo today and see exactly how Continuous transforms your capabilities, enhances data consistency, and delivers immediate value.

Make Every Day a Selling Event: Unlock Expansion Revenue with Usage & Prepaid Metrics

Posted on June 18, 2025 by Sean Joyce - Consumption-Based Pricing, Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, Usage-Based Pricing

How many upsells slipped through because your reps never saw the signal? As prepaid usage models become the SaaS standard, that blind spot costs quota and growth.

Every day, customers signal buying intent through usage spikes, burned-down credits, and feature engagement. But if your reps can’t see those signals, they can’t act. And that’s revenue left on the table.

Reps Can’t Sell What They Can’t See

Sales teams live in Salesforce, but usage and prepaid credit data usually doesn’t. It’s scattered across billing systems, siloed in finance-owned spreadsheets, or buried in your product, far from where selling happens.

Without visibility:

Reps miss the exact moment to expand or renew
Deals become harder to land, renewals get riskier, and churn risk rises
Customers get blindsided by surprise overages, eroding trust

When sales can’t see the signals, growth stalls.
Reps chase new logos while existing customers go untapped. Acquisition costs rise. Forecasts get shaky. And what should be low-effort expansions turn into missed quarters.

Usage & Prepaid Metrics Are Your Expansion Pipeline

Your next wave of pipeline isn’t in marketing leads—it’s hiding in product activity and prepaid consumption. Every usage spike or credit drawdown is a trigger for upsell. Every under-utilized plan is a retention warning.

Key signals include:

Usage spikes or growth trends signaling immediate need.
Low credit balances approaching zero, indicating an upsell window before overages occur.
Balances nearing expiration on prepaid commitments—prime time for renewal or upsell conversations.
Feature adoption patterns that hint at cross-sell opportunities.

These aren’t just health metrics, they’re daily, high-value selling signals.

Continuous Puts the Signals Where Sales Works

What if every buying signal showed up in Salesforce as it happens—usage spikes, low credit balances, looming expirations, and under-utilized features?
No external reports. No manual data hunts. Just timely, high-value signals delivered where reps already work.

Continuous brings usage and credit data into Salesforce with no extra systems and no added steps. Just the signals that matter into the tools you already use so sales teams can stop reacting and start anticipating.

Ready to See What Your Reps Are Missing?

Get a free Revenue Operations Assessment from our team. We’ll identify the biggest revenue signals hiding in your usage and prepaid data—and show you how to surface them in Salesforce, where your reps already work.

No cost, no commitment. Just insights. Request yours now, and one of our experts will reach out.

The End of Subscriptions: Why Prepaid Usage Models Are Replacing Traditional SaaS Pricing

Posted on June 3, 2025 by Sean Joyce - Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, NetSuite, Salesforce Revenue Cloud

The Shift That Broke the Subscription Model

For years, SaaS companies relied on subscriptions. Predictable pricing, recurring invoices, and standardized contracts became the default.

But that’s starting to change.

Today’s most successful tech companies—like Snowflake, AWS, and Databricks—are shifting to prepaid usage models: savings plans, credit pools, and enterprise commitments that tie revenue to actual product consumption.

This isn’t just a new pricing option. It’s a deeper change in how revenue is created, recognized, and managed. And it’s quickly becoming the standard for modern B2B software.

Subscriptions Worked—Until They Didn’t

The subscription model had a good run. It gave SaaS companies predictable revenue and simplified customer onboarding. But it was never really aligned with how customers use software. You committed to a package, paid every month or year, and hoped you got value out of it.

The result? A lot of shelfware. Unused seats. Over-provisioned tiers. Products collecting dust while the meter keeps running.

That misalignment was tolerated when usage was steady and predictable. Subscriptions were a step forward from perpetual licensing—but they never fully lived up to the SaaS promise of aligning pricing with value. As companies began consuming APIs, infrastructure, and services with highly variable demand, the cracks in the model became harder to ignore.

Customers wanted flexibility. Finance teams wanted efficiency. Vendors needed a better way to show value.

That’s when usage-based pricing entered the picture.

But going fully usage-based creates its own problems. It’s hard to forecast. Hard to budget. And it gives vendors no guarantee of revenue; even if the product is delivering real value.

That’s why the smartest companies aren’t choosing between subscriptions and usage—they’re adopting prepaid usage models that offer the best of both.

They’re not selling subscriptions. They’re not selling pure usage. They’re selling prepaid usage commitments: enterprise savings plans, credit pools, or drawdowns tied to forecasted demand. Customers lock in value. Vendors lock in a commitment. Revenue recognition starts when usage begins.

Why Pure Usage-Based Pricing Isn’t the Endgame

Moving from subscriptions to usage-based pricing was a big step forward. It aligned cost with value. If a customer uses more, they pay more. If they use less, they pay less. That feels fair—and for a while, it looked like the future.

But for both vendors and customers, pay-as-you-go has real limitations.

On the vendor side, usage volatility makes revenue hard to predict. Sales teams have less leverage to drive large deals. Finance teams can’t model growth with confidence.

On the customer side, it’s hard to budget. CFOs hate open-ended invoices. Procurement teams want predictability. Even if the pricing is fair, it feels risky.

That’s why most leading companies didn’t stop at usage-based pricing. They layered on prepaid usage models—enterprise savings plans, committed spend, or flex credits. These offer volume-based discounts in exchange for upfront commitments. Customers get flexibility. Vendors get predictability.

It’s not just about pricing differently. It’s about changing how both sides think about value and commitment.

Snowflake: The Playbook for Prepaid Usage at Scale

No company has popularized prepaid usage models more than Snowflake.

Snowflake doesn’t sell subscriptions or push seat-based packages. Instead, Snowflake sells usage commitments—enterprise contracts where customers prepay for credits they can draw down over time. It’s flexible for the customer and predictable for Snowflake. And it shows up in one powerful number: Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO).

As of their latest earnings, Snowflake reported $6.7 billion in RPO, up 34% year-over-year.

That number is huge. But here’s the part most people miss:

RPO isn’t recognized revenue. It’s just a committed contract. The revenue only lands when customers actually use the credits.

This is the heart of the prepaid usage model. You lock in a deal up front, but the real success depends on customer adoption. If usage lags, revenue recognition stalls. If usage spikes, revenue accelerates.

From the outside, it looks like Snowflake has cracked the code. In reality, they’ve built the infrastructure to make this model work—usage visibility, alignment across sales and success, and real-time data that ties consumption to value.

Most companies fall short. They adopt prepaid models but don’t operationalize them. Credit balances live in billing systems or spreadsheets. Customer-facing teams don’t know what’s been used. Finance can’t forecast. Sales can’t spot expansion.

The result? RPO just sits on the books instead of turning into revenue.

You Can’t Drive Revenue If You Can’t See the Credits

When revenue depends on prepaid commitments, credit visibility isn’t just a back-office metric. It’s a growth lever.

But in most companies, credit data is buried—tucked away in billing systems, or hidden in finance-owned spreadsheets. By the time someone realizes a customer hasn’t touched their credits, it’s too late to act.

That’s a problem:

If usage is lagging, it’s a customer success issue
If there’s a pile of unused credits, it’s a sales opportunity
If finance can’t see burn rates, it’s a forecasting risk

Yet almost no one surfaces this data in the tools where people actually work.

CSMs are in Salesforce. So are account execs. But the data they need to drive adoption, expansion, and renewals is stuck elsewhere. The result? Slower growth. Lower retention. Missed revenue.

The solution isn’t more reporting. It’s embedding credit visibility—balances, burn rates, usage trends—directly into CRM and ERP.

That’s how you align sales, success, and finance around what’s been committed, what’s been used, and what’s left to earn.

Embedded Revenue Infrastructure: Built for the Prepaid Era

Most billing systems weren’t built for prepaid usage. Legacy vendors assumed static subscriptions and monthly renewals.

In response, a wave of new usage-based billing vendors emerged. Many handle ingestion and rating well—but that’s only part of the equation. But they’re usually standalone systems, disconnected from the tools teams actually use.

They solve for calculation—but not for adoption, visibility, or execution.

That’s where Continuous is different.

We’re a usage-based billing platform, too—but we’re built to work within your core systems. We don’t just calculate usage. We make it visible and actionable in Salesforce, NetSuite, and other platforms you already rely on.

Sales teams can see credit consumption on the customer record. Finance can forecast based on real-time usage. Customer success can intervene before credits go unused.

This is Embedded Revenue Infrastructure.

It’s not just billing. It’s infrastructure that helps teams turn prepaid commitments into recognized revenue—without another system to log into, and without another silo to manage.

Ready to Turn Prepaid Commitments Into Revenue?

Our Rapid Technical Assessment helps B2B teams understand what’s working, what’s not, and how to operationalize prepaid usage inside Salesforce and NetSuite.

We’ll review your current architecture, identify blockers, and map out how to unlock usage-based revenue—without adding another standalone system.

Request your free Revenue Operations Assessment
Get a tailored review of your current architecture and personalized insights on where Continuous can drive the most value.

👉 Fill out this quick form and one of our experts will follow up with your survey—no pressure, no commitment.

Embedded Revenue Infrastructure: The End of Standalone Billing

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Sean Joyce - Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, NetSuite, Salesforce Revenue Cloud

Continuous Billing Workflows for Salesforce and NetSuite

Editor’s note: This post builds on Part 1 of our Embedded Revenue Infrastructure series, where we explored how SaaS billing evolved from subscription simplicity to usage-based complexity—and why traditional billing platforms can’t keep up.

In Part 2, we define the new approach: Embedded Revenue Infrastructure—and explain why it’s replacing standalone billing for modern B2B teams.

It’s time for a new approach.

For years, the promise of recurring billing platforms was simplicity. Standardize pricing. Automate invoices. Get paid faster.

But somewhere along the way, things got more complicated. Today, many B2B companies find themselves stuck between their CRM and ERP, trying to make a third system—the billing platform—play nice with everything else.

That third system often becomes a bottleneck. Teams waste time reconciling data, rebuilding product catalogs, and explaining invoices to confused customers. Pricing innovation slows to a crawl. The tools that were meant to streamline revenue operations now stand in the way.

Embedded Revenue Infrastructure means monetization isn’t handled in a separate system. It’s woven into your core processes—from quoting to invoicing to revenue recognition.

This isn’t just a technical shift—it’s a philosophical one:

Billing should extend your existing workflows, not require an entirely new one.

The Three Principles of Embedded Revenue Infrastructure

1. Revenue Logic Embedded in Sales and Finance Workflows

Standalone billing platforms treat monetization as a separate domain. That leads to duplicated product catalogs, contract terms, and customer hierarchies.

Embedded Revenue Infrastructure eliminates that duplication by placing pricing and billing logic directly inside your CRM and ERP.
Salesforce handles quoting. NetSuite handles invoicing. APIs connect to your usage data. Everyone works in the tools they already know.

Fewer integrations. Faster changes. Teams that stay in sync.

2. Flexible for Any Pricing Model

Modern businesses don’t just sell subscriptions. They sell prepaid credits, usage tiers, annual commitments, and complex hybrid models.

Most billing systems force you to contort your pricing strategy to fit their data model. Embedded Revenue Infrastructure flips that:

You define the pricing model. The system adapts.

That flexibility means faster time to market, better enterprise deal support, and less time rebuilding your stack with every pricing change.

3. Real-Time, Accurate, and Efficient

Traditional billing platforms rely on syncing data across systems. That leads to delays, mismatches, and costly reconciliation.

Embedded Revenue Infrastructure avoids all of that. Because revenue logic lives inside your workflows, your data stays accurate and real-time—without middleware or batch jobs.

Finance gets clean invoices. Sales sees real-time balances. Customers stop disputing bills. Everyone saves time.

Embedded vs. Standalone Billing: A Quick Comparison

Table comparing Embedded Revenue Infrastructure vs. Standalone Billing Platforms across architecture, pricing flexibility, system of record, deployment complexity, time to value, and change management.

Stop Comparing the Wrong Things

One of the biggest traps companies fall into is comparing billing platforms like commodity software. Who has the best quoting UI? Who supports more revenue recognition scenarios? Who automates more?

It’s not that those questions are wrong—they’re just based on the wrong assumption:
That billing needs to be a separate system at all.

Standalone vendors benefit from this thinking. It lets them justify rebuilding parts of your CRM and ERP. It turns them into the system of record for your most critical financial logic. And it locks you into a platform that wasn’t built to work with your stack—but to replace it.

A Different Starting Point

At Continuous, we started from a different place.
We asked:

What do our customers already have in place?
What’s already working?

Instead of building a “sticky” platform that replaces your core systems, we built a flexible layer that embeds into them—whether that’s Salesforce, NetSuite, or internal usage systems. This approach became Embedded Revenue Infrastructure. And it requires a different way of evaluating solutions.

The New Evaluation Criteria

Instead of asking who checks the most feature boxes, ask:

Will this solution extend or replace our CRM and ERP?
Can it embed into our existing quote-to-cash process—without starting over?
Is it flexible enough to meet us where we are and grow with us?

We Don’t Have a One-Size-Fits-All Answer

The truth is, we don’t know exactly how Continuous should be embedded in your stack until we understand your current architecture. That’s the point.

We believe architecture should follow your business—not the other way around.

Some customers use Salesforce CPQ and NetSuite Advanced Financials. Others use Revenue Cloud Advanced, Stripe, or homegrown metering. What they have in common is that Continuous fits into their existing stack—not the other way around.

That’s the real difference. And it’s why we believe Embedded Revenue Infrastructure is the future.

Ready to Simplify Sales and Finance?

Stop juggling disconnected systems and painful integrations.
Continuous helps unify your sales and finance processes by embedding directly into the platforms you already trust.

Request your free Revenue Operations Assessment
Get a tailored review of your current architecture and personalized insights on where Continuous can drive the most value.

👉 Fill out this quick form and one of our experts will follow up with your survey—no pressure, no commitment.

You Don’t Need Another Billing System—You Need a Better Approach

Posted on April 30, 2025 by Sean Joyce - Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, standalone billing, Usage-Based Pricing

Recurring billing vendors promised simplicity. As businesses shifted toward what became known as the “Subscription Economy,” CRM, ERP, and customer-facing (front-office) systems lacked native support for recurring revenue models, creating operational gaps that gave rise to specialized vendors—”SaaS Recurring Billing“—to bridge the divide.

Today, customer expectations have evolved dramatically. Businesses now face greater complexity as customers demand flexible, personalized options for consuming and paying for products and services. This complexity significantly impacts front-office sales processes and drives downstream billing and reporting challenges.

While CRM and ERP platforms like Salesforce and NetSuite have responded to these evolving demands by continually innovating and enhancing their capabilities, the standalone billing vendors—both legacy providers and new entrants—have largely failed to keep pace. Instead of true innovation, these vendors have continued promoting a “third cloud” model that positions standalone platforms between CRM, ERP, and front-office systems. This outdated approach results in operational fragmentation and duplicated efforts, rather than genuine improvement.

Before exploring why standalone billing platforms inherently struggle, we must first clearly understand the essential pillars of every modern B2B organization’s revenue infrastructure:

CRM, ERP, and Front-Office Systems: Essential Pillars of Revenue Infrastructure
Effective revenue operations depend on three interconnected core platforms:

Infographic Showing CRM, ERP, and Front-Office Systems

CRM Systems: Excel in managing customer relationships, deal structuring, quoting, and flexible pricing management. Salesforce provides robust examples of integrated quoting and subscription management directly within CRM workflows.

ERP Systems: Focused on financial accuracy, compliance, revenue recognition, and accounts receivable. Platforms like NetSuite integrate comprehensive financial management aligned closely with accounting processes.

Customer/Front-Office Systems: Include platforms such as e-commerce, self-service portals, and internal product systems that manage customer engagement, subscriptions, credits, and prepayments, capturing the precise usage data critical for billing and monetization.

Additionally, specialized capabilities such as tax calculation engines, payment gateways, and specialized usage management systems can provide significant value if effectively connected to the core revenue stack. For companies already invested in specialized usage management solutions, leveraging these systems within a unified revenue infrastructure is crucial to ensure seamless interoperability and to avoid redundant or fragmented processes.

Together, these core systems should form a cohesive and unified revenue infrastructure. Effective monetization solutions must complement and enhance these systems—not duplicate or disrupt them.

Why Standalone Billing Platforms Fail to Deliver

Standalone billing platforms typically fall into three categories, each with inherent limitations and a critical shared flaw:

Quote-to-Revenue Platforms: While these newer entrants accurately recognize the importance of cohesive front-to-back-office collaboration, their strategy of replicating pricing, configuration, quoting, billing, revenue recognition, and collections capabilities within a single solution proves impractical at scale. Inevitably, they cannot match the depth and flexibility of dedicated CRM and ERP systems.

Legacy Subscription Management Solutions: Initially built for simple subscription models, these systems struggle significantly with complex usage-based or hybrid monetization strategies. Attempting to address complexity, many legacy vendors developed their own CPQ tools around their proprietary billing catalogs, which are inherently limited compared to modern CPQ systems.

Usage-Based Billing Platforms: These specialized platforms excel at usage rating but struggle to clearly define how their capabilities seamlessly integrate into broader CRM, ERP, and front-office ecosystems, often resulting in redundant configurations and operational friction.

The fundamental flaw shared by these SaaS Recurring Billers is their reliance on multiple disconnected product catalogs. Defining sales rules in CRM and separately redefining them in billing systems inevitably introduces complexity, data discrepancies, and costly integration challenges.

Infographic Showing SaaS Recurring Billing Vendor Challenges

Symptoms Your Revenue Infrastructure Is Breaking Down

How do you know if your revenue infrastructure is failing to support your business effectively? Look for these recognizable symptoms:

Forced Manual Handoffs: Sales and finance teams repeatedly re-enter or manually adjust data because your sales and billing systems don’t talk to each other efficiently.
Slow Pricing and Packaging Changes: Launching new pricing strategies or monetization models requires extensive IT projects and lengthy configurations.
Billing Inaccuracies and Revenue Leakage: Persistent discrepancies between quoted prices and billed amounts cause customer frustration and lost revenue.
Internal Team Frustration: Sales, finance, and revenue operations teams are misaligned, each blaming the other for process inefficiencies and delays.
Engineering and IT Overload: Significant resources are spent maintaining fragile custom integrations and resolving data conflicts rather than focusing on strategic initiatives.

These symptoms aren’t just operational headaches—they’re clear indicators that your revenue infrastructure needs immediate attention.businesses to build complex integrations, making it harder to achieve a seamless sales-to-finance workflow.

The Future: Introducing Embedded Revenue Infrastructure

Infographic Showing Continuous Revenue Infrastructure and a Seamless Workflow

The true issue is not any single billing solution but the outdated concept of a standalone “third cloud.” Originally necessary when CRM, ERP, and front-office systems were immature, this approach now struggles under modern monetization demands.

The future of revenue management demands Embedded Revenue Infrastructure—an innovative model that integrates advanced pricing, usage tracking, billing, and revenue logic directly into existing CRM, ERP, and front-office systems. This approach eliminates redundant catalogs and complex integrations, creating a unified, agile, and scalable foundation for revenue operations.

In our next blog, we’ll dive deeper into Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, explore its transformative potential, and show precisely how it addresses these critical operational challenges.

Ready to simplify your sales and finance processes?

Stop juggling fragmented systems and costly integrations. At Continuous, we unify your sales and finance workflows by building on the trusted CRM and ERP platforms you already use.

Request your free Revenue Operations Assessment from Continuous and get expert insights tailored specifically to your business—no cost, no commitment. Simply fill out this quick form, and one of our experts will reach out with your assessment survey.