My Big Idea: billing platform m3ter

Hi John! What's your elevator pitch?‍

Companies are bleeding revenue because their billing systems can't handle mixing subscriptions, usage, and enterprise deals.

m3ter is an intelligent infrastructure layer that transforms your existing CRM and ERP into a powerful monetisation engine. We don't replace your billing systems - we enhance them, enabling hybrid and usage-based pricing at enterprise scale.

Our platform ingests raw usage data, transforms it into precise billable metrics, and automates metering, rating, billing, and audit traceability. Through native connectors to Salesforce, NetSuite, and AWS Marketplace, we bridge the gap between usage events and revenue recognition.

Our customers unlock millions in EBITDA by plugging revenue leaks, without ripping out core infrastructure.

What does the market need it?‍

SaaS companies want fairer, value-driven pricing. 61% of SaaS companies now have some form of usage-based pricing, up from just 27% in 2018. Usage-based pricing sounds simple - pay for what you use - but in practice, it's a data and systems headache. Sales teams need flexibility to agree custom terms, which means hundreds or thousands of contract variations to track. You need to marry those terms with usage data, which is complex in its own right, and then calculate accurate invoices. Many companies still use spreadsheets for this purpose. The Excel outputs data points into your invoicing system, and the whole process is error-prone and hard.

I saw it firsthand - even at AWS - some of the most sophisticated teams in the world struggled. As companies scale, the situation becomes untenable. You've got a burden of responsibility to manage individual terms correctly because subtle differences matter. Current solutions either can't handle the complexity or force you to replace your entire billing stack, which is a massive undertaking. We saw a gap for something that automates the hard bit without rip and replace. What we've built is a smart data layer that sits between your product and billing systems, automating all that complexity. It's not just new technology - it's a new category of infrastructure for monetisation.

Where is the business today?‍

We're in a really strong position. Since founding m3ter in 2020, we've grown our customer base by over 375% and now support businesses managing over $1Bn in annual recurring revenue. We're proud to share that m3ter has been named one of Europe’s 250 fastest-growing startups for 2025 by Sifted. We've built a team of over 50 employees, and were named one of the Sunday Times Best Places to Work in 2024.

We're working with some incredible companies like ClickHouse, Onfido, and Sift, businesses that are at the forefront of usage-based pricing innovation. We've moved well beyond proving the concept. Now we're delivering on our vision of rolling out advanced data products on top of the world's leading metering and rating infrastructure. The market validation has been remarkable, and we're seeing our approach copied, which tells us we're onto something significant.‍

What made you think there was money in this?‍

Honestly, it started with pain. My first project out of university was a telco billing system, and it didn't go that well, so I guess I'm spending the rest of my life fixing that. The real epiphany came at GameSparks, the backend-as-a-service platform I co-founded in 2013. We had thousands of game developer customers on usage-based pricing, and the operational burden was crushing us. We were doing complex calculations in spreadsheets to figure out what to invoice, and errors were constant. There wasn't a solution out there that could handle it, so I ended up writing one in Python. That was really where m3ter was born.

When AWS acquired GameSparks in 2017, I joined Amazon. Even inside one of the world's most sophisticated tech organisations, managing contract complexity and usage metering was a massive operational strain. That's when I realised this wasn't a niche problem, it was a systemic industry flaw.
The shift toward usage-based pricing was accelerating across all of SaaS, and nobody had built the infrastructure to support it.

As for competitors, honestly, nobody else shares our vision. Our mission was always bigger. We didn't want to be another billing system, we wanted to be the data infrastructure layer that makes modern monetisation possible.

What's your biggest strength?‍‍

It's the combination of deep technical expertise and real commercial battle scars. I started my career in engineering, building some of the most complex systems in early digital infrastructure - telco billing, streaming platforms like BBC iPlayer, and SkyGo. We were solving problems that had never been solved before, like video streaming, before broadband was widespread.

Then I transitioned into commercial and product leadership, learning how to win customers and drive revenue. That hybrid skill set is rare, and it's been pivotal; I understand both the technical complexity of what we're building, and the commercial realities of what customers actually need.

At AWS, I learned operational rigor at a scale most companies never see. We've brought that discipline into m3ter. Another strength is our team and shared vision. Many of us came from GameSparks and have worked together across four companies - that continuity is invaluable.

What is the secret to making the business work?‍

The main challenge is managing the complexity of enterprise implementations while maintaining operational excellence. We sell to larger companies, and these projects inevitably throw up things you don't expect. You have to be very good at implementation, very patient, and absolutely relentless about delivering on what you promised. Our job in life is to make legacy systems work with new requirements, and we are the best at it in the market.

Sales teams need flexibility, but that creates complexity downstream. If your operational systems can't handle that complexity accurately and automatically, you lose customer trust. So we built m3ter to handle exactly that - the intersection of flexible commercial agreements and precise technical execution.

The other part of the secret is knowing when to adapt. At certain times in a company's life, you've got to adapt your leadership style. As soon as you start receiving real traction, you need to bring in people with expertise in each area, who can secure the talent and build out the structure. I wouldn't say I do very well at that transition personally, but I recognise it's necessary. And fundamentally, if your employees are happy, your customers will be happy. That's not soft talk - it's operational reality.

How do you market the company?‍

When we started, usage-based pricing was still relatively niche, but we could see it becoming the dominant model. We've invested heavily in educating the market - producing content, sharing insights, and positioning ourselves as the experts who've actually solved this problem at scale. We can see how much our approach has been copied, which validates that we're leading the conversation.

Beyond this, it's been about demonstrating real value with real customers. When you can point to incredible companies that have won and delivered the very vision you've talked about, that speaks louder than any marketing campaign. For example, when Onfido was acquired, the buyer chose to double down on what Onfido had built with us, rather than pursue an alternative path. That kind of customer success is the best marketing we could ask for.

We also focus on building relationships in the SaaS ecosystem - with investors, with other founders, with the infrastructure companies that are our natural partners. It's a relatively tight community, and reputation matters.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

We’ve raised $31.5 million to date, backed by exceptional investors who understand both SaaS infrastructure and fintech. It’s been more than enough to give us the runway we need to keep innovating and scaling responsibly. But funding is never the goal in itself - it’s fuel for growth. What matters is building a sustainable business model, a great culture, and technology that delivers measurable ROI for customers.

Tell us about the business model

We solve a problem that gets exponentially worse as companies scale, which means our value proposition strengthens as customers grow. Once deployed, m3ter becomes mission-critical infrastructure embedded in revenue operations - creating healthy unit economics and strong margins over the customer lifetime.

Our pricing scales with the complexity that customers are managing: the number of pricing metrics, customers, and volume of usage data. As our customers grow their usage-based revenue, we grow with them.

We're not the cheapest option; we're the option that lets you scale without hiring an army of billing operations people.

As a SaaS business, our main costs are people and infrastructure. We've built efficiently across product, engineering, revenue, and customer success, benefiting from modern cloud economics. Break-even is on the horizon as we scale revenue while keeping cost growth disciplined.

Our goal is simple: customers should see m3ter as a growth driver, not an expense.

What were you doing before?

Before m3ter, I co-founded GameSparks in 2013, a backend-as-a-service platform for game developers that grew to thousands of customers before being acquired by AWS. Post-acquisition, I stayed at Amazon working on scaling cloud infrastructure, which exposed me to operational excellence at a level few companies ever reach.

Earlier, I was at Ioco, working on projects like BBC iPlayer and SkyGo, pioneering video streaming technology. That's where I made the shift from purely technical roles into commercial leadership.

My first job out of university was at PricewaterhouseCoopers on a telco billing system. As I said, it could have gone better for me personally, but it planted the seed. Looking back, everything was building toward m3ter in a way that feels inevitable.

Are there any technologies you've found useful?‍

Honestly, the technologies that matter most are the foundational ones - robust databases, cloud infrastructure, APIs that actually work at scale. We've benefited enormously from modern cloud platforms that let you build and scale without managing physical infrastructure. Beyond that, it's more about discipline and process than any particular app or service.

The lesson from AWS was that great technology is only part of it, you need rigorous decision-making processes and operational excellence. That said, we're watching the agent space very closely. Agents are going to automate workflows in ways we're only beginning to understand. The world is divided on this. The big question is how autonomous they will be in decisions around third-party data sources and tooling. If agents can intelligently interact with systems like m3ter to make billing decisions, to adjust pricing in real-time based on usage patterns, to handle contract negotiations, that's a significant advantage. But we're not there yet.

What is the future vision?‍

The long-term vision is for m3ter to define a new category: data infrastructure for monetisation. Right now, companies think about billing as this back-office function, something you bolt on at the end. But in a world where pricing is agile, where every customer may have different terms, where AI features are priced on consumption, where business models are constantly evolving - monetisation needs to be core infrastructure. Our vision is to be that layer. We want to deliver advanced data products on top of the world's leading metering and rating infrastructure. It'll be well-known, it'll be remarkable.

Companies should be able to experiment with pricing models, launch new products with flexible billing, and scale globally without worrying about whether their systems can handle it. Agile pricing, intelligent billing, and customer-specific contract execution shouldn't be painful afterthoughts—they should be seamlessly built into the SaaS operating model. That's the future we're building towards, and there's never been a better time for this kind of entrepreneurial endeavour. The market is ready, the technology is ready, and we're ready. That’s the future we’re building towards - and it will transform how SaaS operates for the next decade.