Receipts, Robots, and a Recruitment Bonanza
The wire has been quiet for a month. Not dead, burt digesting.
OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring billing leaders, neither will name a vendor
The Bird’s scoop: The two most important AI companies in the world both posted senior billing leadership roles this fortnight, with neither job description mentioning a single billing tool.
No Stripe. No Zuora. No Metronome - despite Metronome being Anthropic’s listed billing infrastructure in Stripe’s own blog post from a few weeks back.
Both Anthropic (Director, Order Management & Billing, $230K–$300K) and OpenAI (Order to Cash, Order management, and Billing Lead) are hiring for the full lifecycle: consumption-based billing, subscription management, order-to-cash, enterprise provisioning. The roles are substantive. The compensation is serious. And the silence on tooling is deafening to the bird.
We read this one of two ways. Either both companies are in early-stage ops maturity and genuinely haven’t locked on tooling (which we know isn’t true) - or they’re hiring people specifically to evaluate whether to build in-house.
At OpenAI’s scale, with their billing infrastructure now running on a platform owned by a strategic competitor and that business case writes itself on a napkin.
Anthropic is also paying up to $300K for someone to own billing operations, while their billing infrastructure runs on Stripe, who just acquired Metronome and listed Anthropic as a customer in the announcement. That’s an interesting org chart to inherit on your first day.
The Bird’s prediction from January stands. OpenAI begins building internal billing infrastructure before Q3. These job postings are the first feathers on the runway.
When the companies that define AI monetisation won’t name a billing vendor in a job description, that’s not an oversight. That’s a signal.
✨ SHINY OBJECTS
Stripe’s “Minions” — 1,300 PRs a week, zero human-written code
Stripe one-shots an internal AI coding agent, merging over 1,300 pull requests weekly. All human-reviewed, none human-written. Not a product you can buy, which is precisely the point. Stripe’s engineering velocity is now structurally different from everyone else’s.
Verdict: The most important product announcement Stripe made this week is the one you can’t purchase.
🤫 THE SILENT TREATMENT
Missing in Action: Chargebee, Recurly, Maxio, Lago, Orb, Paddle, Amberflo, and basically everyone else.
The Chargebee silence is now entering its third consecutive issue.
For the default alternative to Stripe for SaaS billing, this is not a great posture.
The market is reshaping around them and they’re standing very still, seemingly hoping that counts as a strategy. It doesn’t.
🏆 MOST BORING UPDATE AWARD
No award this week. The Bird is saving it for whoever publishes a thought leadership post about “the future of billing” while OpenAI is quietly building their own.
— The Billing Bird
Stay on the wire.