Billable items are the core unit for charging a customer through Maple. This typically is a standard license, a usage based item such as API calls or an object such as user seats. Billable items can be set up through the Maple web application. Maple provisions “License” items by default. For usage-based and object-based items, a billable metric needs to be defined before setting up pricing.

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Setting up a Billable Item

Maple supports metering of more transient usage-based items or more persistent object-based items in your product. Maple manages these two concepts distinctly because they made a difference when tracking MRR for your business. Revenue generated through object-based items (such as seats deployed) count towards recurring revenue while revenue generated through usage-based items (such as API calls) do not unless there are a minimum set of pre-purchased items.

With both events and objects synced into Maple, you can set up billable metrics that can be aggregated over metadata captured in the properties field.

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Metrics

Billable metrics are composed of filters and aggregation clauses. Think of these as WHERE and GROUP BY SQL clauses respectively. For example, you can create a billable metric for the COUNT() of API calls based on the following usage based event

{
      "company_id": "...",
      "identifier": "...",
      "transaction_id": "...",
      "timestamp": "...",
      "item_id": "api_call_item_id",
      "properties": {
          "route": "/plans"
      }
  }

Other aggregators leverage a property to aggregate over. Maple supports the following aggregators for usage-based events

  • COUNT() to count the number of events that meet the filter constraints
  • MAX(property) to get the maximum value of the property for events that meet the filter constraints
  • SUM(property) to get the sum of the property for the events that meet the filter constraints
  • UNIQUE(property)to get the count of the number of unique values for the property for events that meet the filter constraints
  • AVG(property) to get the average of the property for the events that meet the filter constraints
  • Unique Count(property) to get the unique count of the property for the events that meet the filter constraints
  • Last Reported In Period(property) to get the last reported value of the property in a time period for the events that meet the filter constraints
  • Last Reported In History(property) to get the last reported value of the property for the events that meet the filter constraints
  • Historical Sum(property) to get the historical sum of the property for the events that meet the filter constraints

Maple also supports additional filtering and group by capabilities on metrics as well.

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Metrics in Product Pricing

One or more metrics can then be added to a single product pricing as separately priced components. This allows you to offer plans that contain components of different billing types.

For example, you can configure the plan to contain both metrics if you wish to offer a plan that is

  • seat-based at $100/mo/user, and
  • has a reporting feature that is charged by usage ($2/per report generation)