Everyone’s Building With AI — But Pricing It? Not So Simple. (So We Put It On A Billboard.)

Chargebee puts tech’s biggest unresolved challenge — billing — on blast, offering customers 1 billion free usage events to fix it

Billions of dollars have been poured into artificial intelligence, but a fundamental question remains unanswered: what is the best way to monetize it? As AI-native companies race to build bigger models, and as legacy players build AI into existing products, AI monetization remains one of the industry’s greatest unsolved challenges. Rather than just talking about it, Chargebee, a leading billing and monetization platform, is forcing the issue into the spotlight—literally.

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Introducing: New High-Volume Usage Ingestion and Billing Capabilities

This week, Chargebee announced the availability of its new high-volume ingestion capabilities, integrated with its robust billing engine, which allow companies to determine their best path to monetizing their AI products by better understanding the value they deliver and using that understanding to inform pricing decisions.

Chargebee’s new capabilities, which include schemaless usage data ingestion, support for multiple pricing models, and granular usage controls, bring together commonly disparate datasets and link AI product usage to billing while supporting multiple pricing strategies.

“As companies build, invest, and experiment with AI, the tech industry is at a crossroads,” said Krish Subramanian, Co-founder and CEO of Chargebee. “There’s no silver bullet when it comes to monetization. There is only the right answer for you, at each phase of your innovation — and the only way to find that answer is through a thoughtful, adaptable, and experimental approach. We are proud to power billing for thousands of companies worldwide today, and these new capabilities will help every one of our customers land on the best monetization approach for them.”

Beyond the Hype: How Innovative Companies Are Monetizing at Scale

While many AI businesses are still searching for a sustainable revenue model, two fast-growing companies are proving that smart monetization strategies work by using Chargebee — which was positioned by Gartner as a Leader in the first-ever Magic Quadrant for Recurring Billing Applications™ — to scale their billing and growth efforts.

Zapier, a global leader in workflow automation, made a bold shift to usage-based pricing in response to its customers’ desire for a simple, flexible pay-as-you-go option, for products including its new Zapier Agents. After previously offering plans with a specific number of “Zaps” (integrations) each customer could set up, they made Zaps unlimited and instead began charging based on the number of Tasks automated by all of a customer’s Zaps. Customers are now using 50% more total tasks each month.

“Our shift to usage-based pricing drove a massive increase in product usage — showing that customers are more likely to use our system when they have clarity and transparency around what they’re paying for,” said Wade Foster, Co-founder and CEO of Zapier. “AI is catalyzing founders to think differently about their business models, and I’m proud of how we’ve aligned our pricing strategy with the value customers receive from our solution.”

DeepL, a leading global Language AI company, faced a major challenge: ensuring their pricing model could keep up with real-world usage demands. After integrating Chargebee’s billing and monetization platform, they’ve been able to scale revenue, optimize usage-based billing and meet fast-growing demand for their specialized, industry-leading AI-powered translation and writing solutions.

“Chargebee provides DeepL with the robust infrastructure to deliver a seamless experience for our rapidly growing network of over 200,000 businesses and governments worldwide,” said Steve Rotter, CMO of DeepL. “We look forward to continuing to work together to meet the dynamic needs of our customers in today’s fast-paced AI industry.”

The successes of Zapier and DeepL underscore a critical industry truth: companies that figure out monetization today will be the ones leading tomorrow.

A Bold Offer: Free Access to Chargebee’s New Features For All Customers

Today, Chargebee is announcing a new offer — free access to its usage-based billing capabilities — that allows its customers to test usage-based models without upfront cost, whether they’re billing for API calls, characters translated, or tasks performed:

• Up to 100 million free usage events per month, for 24 months—totaling up to 2.4 billion free usage events over the course of the program.
• Available to any Chargebee customer — from AI startups to SaaS platforms to established enterprises — looking to launch or scale a usage-based pricing model.

Billboards That Highlight Tech’s Big Billing Opportunity

In celebration of this announcement, Chargebee has also launched a bold new billboard, digital, and social campaign across San Francisco, New York, and London, displaying a simple but powerful message: to navigate the AI era, companies deserve better billing.

Placed in high-profile locations like downtown San Francisco, JFK Airport, the London Underground, the UK’s Gatwick Airport, and more, the campaign directly speaks to practitioners looking to monetize AI innovations, with statements like:

• “Beyond payments. Better billing for AI.”
• “Billing at the speed of AI.”

With the campaign, Chargebee is bringing to the forefront the fact that monetizing innovation is just as important as innovation itself, and that they are here to help today’s builders create sustainable businesses.

It’s Time to Tackle AI Monetization — Without Backing Off

For all the AI breakthroughs in language models, automation, and decision-making, the biggest challenge remains making AI a sustainable business.

“The industry has been skirting around the hardest problem for too long,” said Subramanian. “The future of AI belongs not to the companies that build the biggest models or the most innovative solutions, but those who are also obsessed with sustainable monetization. Someone has to tackle this issue head-on. Better billing is the key.”

For more information about the campaign, the free usage-based billing offer, or to speak with Chargebee’s AI experts, visit Chargebee.com/ai.

About Chargebee

Chargebee is a leading provider of billing and monetization solutions, empowering businesses with recurring revenue models to streamline operations, capture actionable insights, and drive growth.

Chargebee is trusted by businesses of all sizes, including Zapier, Freshworks, DeepL, Condé Nast, and Pret A Manger, and is proud to have been consistently recognized by customers as a Leader in Subscription Management on G2. To learn more about how Chargebee can help unlock and maximize revenue growth, visit Chargebee.com.

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