At @getmetronome we got a few things right, but one that I'm particularly proud of was aligning our core product development principles to the problem domain that we were tackling. In billing, correctness is a P0 problem, so we oriented every product decision, every process, and every workflow around 'how do you make sure that everything we do is provably correct by construction?' You don't get infinite principles, so picking them correctly and following through is actually incredible alpha. Fun talk about this and more with @quentinclark

Today, we’re launching @TownAI: the AI assistant that learns you. We’re coming out of beta with a $55M Series A led by @ARampell at @a16z, with participation from @KirstenGreen at @forerunnervc and continued support from @firstround, @altcap, and @conviction. Right now, getting real value from AI means prompting, configuring, building workflows, managing agents. We think that’s backwards. The future of AI is a companion that already knows you and how you work. Town connects across your inbox, calendar, Slack, docs, messages, and workflows to understand what you need, then starts doing the work with you. Drafting. Scheduling. Project tracking. Follow-ups. Context gathering. Multi-step tasks. And it only acts when you say so. All adapting to your voice, priorities, routines, and relationships over time. Your Townie is the AI assistant you actually need.

Yesterday at Sessions, we introduced the world to our vision for Streaming Payments. This work is the logical outgrowth of everything we’ve been building on Metronome for the past 6 years. Agents-as-users are different from traditional SaaS users. Humans tolerate latency. Agents don’t. Fundamentally this means that latency of traditional software operations need to shrink across the board. A human cannot detect the difference between a checkout page taking 100ms and 200ms to load. For an agent, every millisecond spent waiting is a wasted millisecond. Humans are also subject to decision fatigue. Ever wonder why every SaaS on earth offers ‘good, better, best’ pricing? It’s because humans are hardwired to choose the middle of three options. In an agent-centric pricing model, you should anticipate that pricing will get very complex and very dynamic. The best analogy I’ve seen is something like HFT where computers make millions of decisions a second to find the exact clearing price of complex products. It turns out that a huge amount of pricing and packaging design is about properly balancing the desire to offer choices that are economically efficient, with the fact that humans aren’t very good at making decisions. Agents don’t have these same foibles. In fact, agents love optimization problems with lots of variables. Agents will opt for pricing constructs that more accurately exchange price to value on a per use-case basis, even if they're significantly more complex than traditional SaaS models. So, what does this all mean for Metronome, Stripe, and Billing? Billing systems need to move to a realtime ledger. Every millisecond of lag between when an agent initiates a transaction and when that transaction clears the ledger is a wasted cycle. Even worse, if you aren’t operating in real time then you'll struggle with runaway agent spend or rampant fraud, or both. Transactions in billing need to be ledgered in a fine-grained way. Agents will have wallets, and they will use those wallets to spend money across a variety of vendors. Every agent action needs to be accounted for in real-time. If you don’t provide rich analytics, usage records, and audit-ready data then you’re going to drown in reconciliation problems and customer escalations. Finally, billing systems need to get more involved in entitlements. In an agent world, value exchange between vendor and agent will be discretized and continuously evaluated. This means that the system that governs access to data (entitlements) will need to be tightly coupled to the budgeting system (wallet). Technologies like MPP, stablecoins, agent wallets will need to be incorporated into core product gating flows in order to prevent runaway spend and fraudulent usage. That’s what we’re building with Streaming Payments. The combination of real-time payments, low latency usage tracking, and Stripe’s world-class infrastructure enables a new class of business models purpose-built for the agentic future.

Introducing streaming payments. Track tokens in real-time with Metronome. Collect payments in real-time with Tempo. Get paid for every token as it’s burned.

Get in touch with our team if you’re grappling with usage-based or AI pricing and evolving monetization models: metronome.com/talk-to-an-exp… Come build the future of monetization infrastructure with us: metronome.com/company/career…

Chapter 2 of the Metronome story begins today. Metronome is officially part of the @stripe family. What started as a napkin-sketch idea—a better way to think about billing and monetization—has, over the past six years, become production infrastructure powering some of the most demanding companies in the world, including OpenAI, Anthropic, HubSpot, Confluent, and more. By joining Stripe, we’re expanding that ambition significantly. Together, we’re building the foundational monetization infrastructure for the next generation of software: systems that are flexible, data-driven, and capable of supporting everything from two engineers in a garage to the largest global enterprises. For customers, this means deeper partnerships, faster product development, and a more powerful, reliable, and integrated platform spanning Metronome and Stripe. We’re building for the long haul. If you’d like to join us, whether as a customer or a gnome, follow the links below. PS - I’ve attached our original architecture diagram from 6 years ago. From day 1, Stripe was a major component of Metronome!

Obligatory garage photos to prove startup cred

After six years, I’m proud to say that Metronome is now moving to the big leagues! We’ve signed a definitive agreement to become a part of Stripe Metronome isn’t going away - we’re just gonna scale way, way, way up with all the resources and amazing talent that Stripe has to offer. metronome.com/blog/important…

Agents are the New Developer Agents, like Claude Code, feel uncanny. My first time using it, I built a mobile web app that tracked pushups using computer vision. Just for fun, to see what it could do. One hour later (mostly its time, not mine), I had an app that just worked. That gave me goosebumps. For the first time, it felt like software wasn't something I built, it was something building with me. It felt like something brand new. I realized: agents had become the new developer. But software agents don't behave like human developers. Software development tools need to evolve. Agents need a new kind of database made for how they work. So we built it. And we're launching it today. Announcing Agentic Postgres: The First Database Built For Agents. There's a lot of engineering behind this: a new copy-on-write block storage layer, fast zero-copy forks, new Postgres extensions for full text search (BM25) and semantic search, what (we think is) the best MCP server for Postgres ever built, and a new CLI and free tier. I'm very proud of what this team has built, especially in such a short period of time. More here: tigerdata.com/blog/postgres-… Please give it a try. We're just getting started. We’d love your feedback. 🐯🚀 @TimescaleDB @TigerDatabase

Today's a good day for Finance pros: @leapfin @getmetronome are partnering. Metronome = flexible usage-based billing Leapfin = AI-powered rev rec Together = closing the gap between billing accounting Read more register for joint webinar → bit.ly/4nUmgtk

Get the whitepaper: bit.ly/45zQzzz

✨Excited to announce Metronome 2.0! Over the past few years, we've learned a lot from powering billing for companies including @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, and @databricks. We've productized those learnings into Metronome 2.0 to help companies launch new products and pricing faster.

So glad this episode went out into the ether. Jesse is smart af and a great friend. Hope you enjoy it.

🥁 Introducing Unpack Pricing, our podcast deconstructing the dark arts of pricing and packaging. Our first episode is with @jesse_miller, VP of Product Growth at Kong. He shares his learnings leading PLG at @Dropbox, @getpostman, and @kong. 🎧 metronome.com/podcast/unpack…

Metronome has been named to @Redpoint's 2024 InfraRed 100, celebrating the most transformative infrastructure companies. 🎉 Thrilled to be recognized for the 2nd year in a row and proud to be powering billing for many of the outstanding companies featured on this list.

Incredibly proud today. Thank you to our investors, team, and customers. You make days like this possible, and you make work feel like play. Come join us! metronome.com/careers

❄️ Walk into a winter wonderland of product updates from the Metronome team: ➡️ Data Export enhancements, including an 8x improvement in data freshness 📊 Credit grants in embeddable dashboards 📅 Increased precision with mid-month credit grants metronome.com/blog/in-tempo-…

Board decision at 5pm. This is our Moon Landing