Chargebee, a leading billing and monetisation platform, today announced the availability of its high-volume ingestion capabilities, integrated with Chargebee’s robust billing engine. The new capabilities allow companies to determine their best path to monetising their AI products by better understanding the value they deliver and using that to inform pricing decisions.

Billions of dollars have been poured into artificial intelligence, but a fundamental question remains unanswered: what is the best way to monetise it? As AI-native companies race to build bigger models, and as legacy players build AI into existing products, AI monetisation remains one of the industry’s greatest unsolved challenges. Chargebee is forcing the issue into the spotlight.

Chargebee’s new capabilities include schemaless usage data ingestion, support for multiple pricing models and granular usage controls, bringing together commonly disparate datasets and linking 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 monetisation. 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 monetisation approach for them.”

Helping innovative companies monetise at scale

While many AI businesses are still searching for a sustainable revenue model, two fast-growing companies are proving that smart monetisation 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, it 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 catalysing 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 its pricing model could keep up with real-world usage demands. After integrating Chargebee’s billing and monetisation platform, it has been able to scale revenue, optimise usage-based billing and meet fast-growing demand for its specialised, 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 monetisation today will be the ones leading tomorrow.

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 – totalling up to 2.4 billion free usage events over the course of the programme

• Available to any Chargebee customer – from AI startups to SaaS platforms to established enterprises – looking to launch or scale a usage-based pricing model.

Highlighting tech’s big billing opportunity

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

Placed in high-profile locations like London Underground, Gatwick Airport, downtown San Francisco, JFK Airport and more, the campaign directly speaks to practitioners looking to monetise AI innovations.