From Idea to Innovation—How Maxio Metering Came to Life
In March, Maxio launched Maxio Metering—a real-time usage billing solution built to help SaaS companies turn every customer interaction into monetized revenue. Designed to eliminate engineering bottlenecks, support complex pricing models, and scale with ease, Maxio Metering was the result of deep cross-functional collaboration across Product, Engineering, and Product Marketing.
As part of the team behind the launch, Product Manager Grant Chambers helped shape everything from technical requirements to go-to-market messaging. In this Q&A, Grant shares his perspective on what makes Maxio Metering different, why it’s needed in today’s SaaS market, and how it’s helping finance and engineering teams work smarter—not harder—when it comes to usage-based billing.
Q&A: A Closer Look at the Product, the Process, and the Impact
Can you introduce yourself and your role at Maxio? How have you contributed to bringing Maxio Metering to life?
My name is Grant Chambers, and I’ve been on the Product team at Maxio for the past four and a half years, with a focus on our Advanced Billing module and billing capabilities. I’m passionate about unlocking enterprise value with creating billing models, automating subscription billing, and diving into the nuance of complex workflows.
As the Product Manager for Maxio Metering, I helped define the engineering requirements, collaborated with our product marketing team to sharpen our value proposition, and worked closely with Design and Engineering to stress test our implementation decisions. It’s been incredibly rewarding to help bring such a powerful solution to life.
What problem does Maxio Metering solve, and why is it needed in today’s SaaS landscape?
The SaaS industry is shifting rapidly toward usage-based pricing models. We’re seeing more companies—many of whom never considered usage-based pricing before—either making the switch now or planning to in the near future. Why? Because usage-based pricing drives real revenue upside. It’s how you turn value delivered into value captured. When customers use more of your product, your revenue should grow accordingly—and that’s exactly what usage-based pricing enables when done right.
Maxio Metering gives companies a flexible, powerful way to implement billing that aligns perfectly with this model. It simplifies the complexity of usage-based billing while enabling businesses to scale without compromise.
How does Maxio Metering differ from traditional usage-based billing solutions?
Traditional solutions require engineering teams to do heavy lifting to aggregate usage data — establishing operational data stores, setting up ETL processes, and orchestrating cron jobs to send data over ‘just in time’ for billing. It’s tedious to implement and difficult to maintain an inherently brittle backend system.
With Maxio Metering, all of that changes. Instead of sending pre-aggregated data, you simply send real-time user actions—what we call “events”—as they happen. One snippet of code embedded in your application triggers these events, and Maxio takes it from there. We handle the aggregation, the complexity, and the scale. It’s a massive simplification of what used to be a painful process.
How does Maxio Metering handle real-time event ingestion and processing at scale?
This is where Maxio Metering really shines. Since we’re working with raw event data—no pre-aggregation—we’re ingesting billions of events per month, often thousands per second. That kind of scale demands a purpose-built, high-throughput event ingestion API.
We’ve built exactly that, leveraging years of experience—including deep expertise originating from Chargify’s acquisition of Keen in 2020, a company specialized in event streaming technology. Real-time data ingestion is in our DNA, and Maxio Metering reflects that expertise.
What are the key technical components required to integrate Maxio Metering into an existing SaaS stack?
Integration is surprisingly simple. Like traditional usage-based billing, you’re still just making API calls—but now, the code lives directly inside your application instead of a back-end cron job pulling from a data warehouse.
This small shift makes a huge difference. By moving the usage aggregation burden to Maxio, you eliminate the need for data warehouses, ETL, and periodic jobs. Your data strategy gets dramatically simpler, and your team saves a ton of engineering hours.
How does Maxio Metering ensure billing accuracy and prevent revenue leakage?
Revenue leakage usually stems from overly complex IT processes—more steps mean more chances for something to break. Traditional billing setups often include five or more steps between a user action and the billing system, which introduces real risk.
With Maxio Metering, that process is reduced to just two steps: your app triggers an event when a user takes an action, and Maxio receives the API call. That’s it. Fewer steps mean fewer failure points—and ultimately, tighter alignment between usage and billing. It’s a smarter way to ensure accuracy and prevent revenue from slipping through the cracks.
How does Maxio Metering scale to support high-volume SaaS businesses?
Maxio Metering was built with scale in mind. You don’t have to worry about API rate limits or infrastructure strain as your customer base grows. Whether you’re a fast-scaling startup or a large-scale enterprise switching to usage-based pricing, Maxio Metering takes the heavy lifting off your plate.
Scaling real-time billing infrastructure is a serious challenge—and it’s one we’ve already solved. When you use Maxio Metering, you’re plugging into a battle-tested system that’s designed to grow with you.
What are some considerations to be aware of when implementing Maxio Metering?
One of the biggest challenges companies face is keeping up with pricing changes driven by Finance or GTM teams. Maxio Metering is built to make your implementation future-proof.
First, you can create multiple Meters for a single Stream, letting you measure the same events in different ways without reconfiguring your data. Second, you can send us any number of event attributes—whether or not you’re currently using them for pricing—which means changes to your pricing model don’t require changes to your code. Third, you can embed code for various user actions throughout your app and use flags to turn on those event streams as needed. So if your unit of measure changes, all it takes is flipping a switch—not rewriting code.
It’s flexibility by design, which means fewer headaches for your dev team down the line.
What are some of the most innovative pricing models you’ve seen customers implement with Maxio Metering?
We’ve seen some incredibly smart pricing strategies built on Maxio Metering. One standout is the use of multi-attribute pricing, where customers segment pricing by up to four different attributes. This allows for incredibly granular pricing that closely aligns with the value being delivered. Some companies are running dozens of pricing segments to fine-tune that value alignment—the level of detail some customers get to with their pricing is remarkable!
Another powerful model is combining usage-based pricing with Term Subscriptions. This hybrid approach gives you the upside of variable revenue while also providing downside protection via a term commitment. It’s a great way to maximize revenue predictability without sacrificing flexibility.
The Future of SaaS Billing Starts Here
Maxio Metering reflects what’s possible when product, engineering, and go-to-market teams align around a shared vision: to give SaaS businesses a smarter, more scalable way to turn usage into revenue. With real-time event ingestion, adaptive pricing flexibility, and minimal engineering lift, it’s built to support modern billing at any scale.
Want to explore how Maxio Metering could work for your business? Let’s talk. This is just the beginning.
