November 2023 Summaries

Usage-based companies should offer in-app consumption dashboards to empower customers to monitor their usage and control spending. Key elements of a great usage dashboard include instant usage feedback, visualization of consumption, data granularity, allowing customers to set thresholds, enabling historical data access, highlighting tier limits, offering tips to reduce usage, forecasting future usage, and identifying trends. Building an effective usage dashboard requires real-time processing of usage data, visualization of usage, implementation of thresholds, and notifications. OpenMeter offers a consumer portal to streamline the creation of exceptional usage dashboards within applications.

In November 2023, OpenMeter was launched on Product Hunt and received significant community support, ranking as the top Developer Tool of the week and second Product of the day. The backstory behind OpenMeter originated from a realization while working at Stripe that there was a lack of standardization around metering usage data across different components. This led to challenges in collecting, aggregating, and analyzing usage data for good data quality. As APM metrics were not accurate enough and time series data storage was expensive, the team decided to develop a stream processing solution. OpenMeter's launch on Product Hunt highlighted these issues faced by companies with usage-based pricing, emphasizing challenges from engineering to finance and product to sales.