Problems with homemade billing systems

As the company was scaling from cradle to unicorn, we faced many billing challenges: monthly and yearly plans, "Pay-as-you-go" components, creation of invoices at scale, taxes, accounting It was a never-ending nightmare. 1 Pricing changes all the time and billing needs to follow. A few weeks ago, we interviewed Nicolas Dessaigne, founder of Algolia and Group Partner at YC. He told us about their terrible experience with pricing and billing. After a series of "Minor" changes to their price plans, they decided a few months ago to adopt a full usage-based pricing model and had to rebuild the entire billing logic. Because of pricing changes, scalability challenges and grandfathered plans, complexity increases and so does the workload. Billing is built around your company's product, it's a living organism, not a feature. At Qonto, the billing project was supposed to be completed by a single backend engineer in only two months. They now know what it costs to build a homemade billing system.