5 Minute Product Overview
This document provides a high-level overview of Paigo platform's functionalities and how we achieved them. The table below demonstrates the critical components of usage-based business operations, which are also the functionality areas of Paigo platform.
Step | Example |
|---|---|
| Define pay-as-you-go price as $0.01 per 1K millisecond GPU with free trial, and 15% annual payment discount |
| Measure customer A used 2,457 millisecond GPU at 2023-01-01T13:47:00Z |
| Send data 2,457 to a billing system in real-time reliably |
| Deduplicate, transform 2,457 millisecond into time-series append-only usage journal and save in the right database shard |
| Aggregate into hourly, daily, and monthly usage, then group by SKU, customer, and other dimensions |
| At the end of Jan 2023, calculate total bills of customer A, create tax-compliant invoices, and collect Stripe Payment from customer A |
| Calculate MRR, ARR, growth and retention of this product for Q4 2022, and generate visualized reports for executives |
| Identify the unit cost of 1K millisecond is $0.0087, and the sales price with customer A has a 14.94% contribution profit margin |
Paigo provides a powerful pricing engine with great flexibility. SaaS business of any scale can manage winning business pricing strategies easily in Paigo. Below are some examples of the pricing strategies Paigo can support:
- Various pricing structure: pay-as-you-go, subscription tier, flat rate, or hybrid.
- Pricing add-on: usage entitlement, overage charge, free trial, discount
- B2B sales deal: private contract, commitment, prepaid credit
Pricing plans are often called SKUs, product lines, offerings, or packages. Paigo's pricing module empowers SaaS business to create and mange as many pricing plans as needed in no-code way. The pricing strategy can be defined, analyzed and improved in Paigo dashboard efficiently.
Paigo provides billing infrastructure for usage-based business mode. The billing infrastructure achieves 100% billing automation through the following steps:
- Measure customer usage Paigo's unique usage measurement engine deeply integrates with SaaS application architecture to calculate precise usage in real-time. The usage measurement engine supports infrastructure-based, agent-based, datastore-based, SQL-based and API-based usage measurement. See Measure and Collect Usage Data at Scale chapter for more information.
- Collect usage data Delivery the measurement the usage data to backend billing system with client-side transformation, high-availability and reliability. Usage data collection in Paigo is also done by usage measurement engine.
- Persist billing data Once the usage data is delivered at the backend, Paigo applies algorithms to process data to ensure it's uniqueness, and persist the data point in database as time-series append-only usage journal with proper indexing for billing and analytics use cases.
- Aggregate usage Run batch processes to aggregate raw data layer into different aggregated layer, such as hourly sum, daily maximum, or monthly average. Also group data by common use cases such as product lines, customers, or pricing plans.
- Invoice and payment At the end of billing cycle, scheduled processes run to calculate all the service usage by each customer and the total amount owed. Tax-compliant invoice is generated for review. Payment requests are issued upon the approval of the invoice. Paigo also takes care of failed payment and revenue recovery. See Process Payment with Stripe chapter for more information.
Every step in sequence is fully automated by Paigo without engineering effort or internal system by SaaS business. To learn more about the end-end experience of using Paigo Billing, read the below documents.
Since usage-based model heavily rely on unit economy, cost benchmark becomes extremely important for SaaS business. Paigo platform provides the following usage-based cost insights out-of-box:
- Total cost
- Variable cost as designated by usage dimensions
- Fixed cost
- Cost breakdown
- Unit cost
Business leaders care about the impact on business traction of usage-based model. Paigo leverages massive data sets to derive critical business metrics, as listed below.
- Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
- Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
- Monthly over month growth rate
- Year over year growth rate
- Revenue projection
- Gross margin analytics
- Contribution margin analytics
For Cloud Marketplaces (AWS, Azure and GCP), SaaS product offering requires SaaS customer usage report continuously and precisely on a fixed schedule in order to invoice SaaS customer correctly. Paigo has the cloud marketplace integration fully automated so that SaaS business just needs to enable it with one click. Paigo platform automatically measures SaaS customer usage, collects into database for persistence, and aggregates according to the policy of marketplace, report usage to marketplace API by a scheduler, and finally consolidates revenue data from marketplaces.
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