As flexible as an Octopus running a Yoga studio

Thoughts on flexibility in billing systems, cute octopus facts and freshly squeezed product updates.

The key thing we’ve been focussing on, in the past 5-6 months at Togai is building a flexible billing system.

Why?

Because companies shouldn’t have to choose between pricing that truly captures the value they create and pricing that is operationally feasible.

At every stage of your company, your billing needs will be different.

• As you build new features, your pricing models and monetization strategy will change to accommodate your new product offering.

• As you grow, you’ll invariably tweak your GTM motion -

  • you’ll start with founder led sales,

  • then create a self-serve motion for smaller customers

  • and then set up a sales-led motion when you move upmarket to get enterprise customers.

Legacy billing solutions that are available today cater to seat based, prepaid subscriptions and don’t give you the flexibility to price the way that makes sense for your business.

• Want to set up feature limits and automate upgrades and downgrades? Sure, sit down and build a solution yourself.

• Want to sell to enterprise? Well too bad - you’ll have to create a separate price plan for every customer to accommodate their customizations.

• Want to try a usage based pricing for a new feature/product you’re launching? Don’t even think about it.

None of this is anecdotal. We felt this pain ourselves when we were building our previous company. And that’s why we set out to build a robust billing system that works no matter what you throw at it. No matter how complex/unique your pricing and processes are.

A system that fits you just right today. And will be able to support any complexity that arises tomorrow.

Today I can confidently say that Togai gives you the flexibility to choose any - pricing model, payment term, and GTM motion. And I’m so proud of our team for that.

So this month, when I sat down to write the Product newsletter, I had one thing in mind. To make the reader understand why every company needs a flexible billing system and to show that Togai is exactly that.

To start with, I grabbed a hot cup of White Chocolate Latte, went to ChatGPT and said:

and one of the answers it spit out was this

As flexible as an Octopus running a yoga studio

Damn.

Now that’s an image I can’t get out of my head.

(yeppp, I used Midjourney to create this)

Sure enough, I went into a rabbit hole.

About Octopuses (Yes, that’s the plural form).

Did you know that these creatures are -

• the most flexible animals out there

• super smart (as evidenced by all the jar opening videos)

• stressed when they get bored (sometimes this leads them to eat their own arms)

• masters of camouflage and

• super playful

The rabbit hole only got deeper as I started imaging a very Pixar-like story introduction:

There was once a lively little octopus-child called Squishana. As a kid, everyone was amazed at how flexible she was. But as she grew up and went to school, she was bullied a lot for being different from all the other human kids. She had no friends to support her and quickly developed anxiety. Putting 2 and 2 together, her mom decided to send her to yoga classes - to calm her anxiety and work on her flexibility. She immediately caught on, got damn good at it and dropped out of school. Why?

To start a yoga studio. She calls it OctoPose.

I then went to Runway to try and actually make this video 😂 when I got a rude slack notification.

Ummm, oops.

I guess that’s it about octopuses 😬 (at least for this edition of the newsletter 😉)

Let’s get into the actual product updates now, yeah?

July Updates:

The new tentacles/features that were added last month significantly improve the flexibility of the platform, giving you the ability to price and bill in any way that makes sense for your business.

Want to try them out yourself?

Just sign up for free and give it a test drive 🏎️

But read on for the low-down:

1. Entitlements/Feature Limits: In June we released v1 of Entitlements. Very quickly, we were flooded with feature requests that were Entitlements-related. So we doubled down on it this month and released some really massive improvements:

   1. You can now set up tiered or volume pricing models for Entitlements

   2. Want to grant feature credits on a recurring basis? yep, that’s possible now with Recurring Entitlements. You can even set up your own custom cycle to define the actual frequency.

   3. Enriched values are now supported for Entitlements. This means you can apply custom formulas and calculations on the incoming feature usage data within the events.

   4. Idempotency checks are now enabled for Entitlement events. This means you can rest assured that there won’t be any double-counting while calculating usage.

      

2. Price Plan Overrides: When you’re selling to enterprise or when you’re very early stage - you need to have flexibility in your pricing. Each customer is going to have a different price plan. And there’s going to be a bunch of customization required. The issue is, if you don’t have a structured way to handle this, you’ll be forced to create a separate price plan for every single customer you acquire. What a mess!

   This is exactly why we built Price Plan Overrides. With Overrides, you create one master price plan and create customizations within that plan as and when they’re needed. Togai lets you customize every single part of a price plan - start and end dates, grace period, pricing cycle, the actual price of the different rate cards. You can now also add or delete fixed fees and license fees to the price plan.

3. Adyen integration: Certain billing systems (like Stripe Billing) lock you in with specific payment platforms and don’t let you work with others. Not Togai. We’re integrating with various payment platforms so you can choose from an array of options. Adyen was just added to that list!

4. Recurring fixed fee: As the name suggests, you now have the option of having one-time fixed fees (say, you want to charge an implementation fee) or fixed fees that repeat in a specific frequency (say, recurring add-ons).

If any of these capabilities interested you, and you’d like a detailed walkthrough - we’re just one call away.

Some super cool stuff in the pipeline are being built as you’re reading this. Here’s a sneak peek:

• Docusign and Quickbooks integrations,

• Recurring credits,

• Webhooks, and

• an option to purchase one-time credits and fixed fees.

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