Meet Hyperline, a new product that handles pricing and billing for software-as-a-service companies. The company provides integrations so that you can quickly start billing. It then supports different scenarios, such as recurring subscriptions, usage-based billing, custom discounts and more.
This isn’t the first company that focuses on pricing and billing — examples include Recurly and Chargebee. But these are complex revenue management platforms that don’t necessarily work well for small SaaS startups that are just getting started.
Alternatively, some companies choose to develop these pricing and billing features in house. But B2B software has changed quite a lot with sales negotiation processes and usage-based pricing. It can lead to mistakes.
When you have configured Hyperline, the company handles all things related to revenue. You can import your customer data from your database, configure your pricing rules, connect the platform with your CRM and leverage popular payment providers, such as Stripe or GoCardless.
After that, Hyperline generates invoices directly. It handles different VAT rates — this isn’t a paid add-on like on some platforms. The product then orchestrates payment requests, which means that it can automatically charge a card or a bank account.
Finally, Hyperline provides a monitoring dashboard so that you can see if there is any failed payment. You can also perform billing actions from there.
The startup raised a $4.4 million (€4 million) funding round led by Index Ventures a few months ago. Kima Ventures and Cocoa also participated in the round. Several business angels invested in the company as well, such as Rodolphe Ardant, Guilhem Bellion, Steve Avani, Thibaud Elziere, Quentin Nickmans, Alexandre Berriche and Nico Rosberg.
Iterating on pricing more regularly
By default, tech teams can interact with Hyperline using the company’s API. But “if companies want to configure it and use it in a ‘no-code’ way, they can do so. If you want to tweak your usage-based pricing, you don’t have to through the tech team,” founder Lucas Bédout told me.
And this is key to understanding Hyperline’s appeal. Many SaaS companies define their pricing strategy and then work on the product roadmap. Pricing and product features don’t necessarily evolve at the same time.
“There are discrepancies between pricing and the product team. Pricing is a project that companies do every couple of years. The company brings in consultants and we put everything back in place – it takes six months to a year to implement everything,” Index Ventures partner Julia Andre told me. “But pricing has an impact on acquisition and churn.”
With a product like Hyperline, pricing can become a continuous project. At the same time, Index Ventures is betting on a next-generation pricing and billing startup that could potentially perform better than legacy products.
Dozens of companies are already using the product, such as Gladia, a startup I covered earlier today and is running a usage-based pricing. As Hyperline starts scaling, it will have more data on SaaS revenue strategies and it will be able to make some recommendations to reduce churn, improve the average revenue per customer, etc. And that should also increase Hyperline’s bottom line as the company takes a small cut on each transaction.
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