The chorus turns beige
The holiday season was quiet... Too quiet. While the predators sleep, the middle tier scrambles to look grown-up.
OUR BIG STORIES THIS WEEK
Lago and Orb rebrand: The beige takeover
Our scoop: Two billing vendors emerged from their chrysalises this week, wings still wet, desperate to look “mature.” Instead, they look identical.
Both have committed the cardinal sin of B2B SaaS design: beige.
Our diagnosis: Both companies are scrambling to own the “AI native billing” narrative because every vendor knows AI changes everything about usage metering. But instead of differentiating on technical capability they differentiated on... gradient direction and font serifs.
Fear of being different is worse than being wrong. At least wrong is memorable.
ZUORA’S MIDLIFE CRISIS: “Usage pricing was a mistake, actually”
The OG subscription platform has “discovered” hybrid pricing.
Zuora posted on LinkedIn (Jan 6) that “usage pricing promised perfection. Reality had other plans”, so now they’re positioning hybrid pricing, meaning blending fixed and usage components as the market solution.
Zuora spent nearly 20 years flogging subscriptions, then usage-based models as the future of SaaS. Their entire pitch was “subscriptions are dying, usage is the way” and now they’ve discovered that pure usage-based pricing creates “unpredictable bills” that CFOs reject.
Feels a bit like this is damage control
Zuora Collections AI (launched Jan 8). says they have “AI [that] helps cut the busywork” in collections operations.
Translation: Sounds a bit like dunning to me. They’ve bolted some GPT onto AR aging reports and automated dunning emails. It’s a premium feature, naturally.
Our verdict: Watching Zuora admit usage pricing was oversold is incredible. Welcome to the club, boys.
✨SHINY OBJECTS
Lago AI
“ML-powered usage forecasting” in Beta, of course.
Their pitch: “Our own ML model” for predicting usage-based revenue. 12-month forward forecasts with three scenarios (Conservative, Realistic, Optimistic), with filters by currency, customer, region, plan.
The reality: CFOs are genuinely terrified of usage-based overages, so forecasting tools are the flashlight for the dark room.
Our verdict: Wait for GA before trusting it with forecasts that matter.
Dodo Payments’ ContextMCP
Their pitch: “An MCP-native system that continuously syncs repos, docs, and APIs and serves always fresh context to agents”. Built internally for Sentra (their AI billing automation tool).
The Reality: Eh. Dodo built this to solve their own problems automating billing operations and open-sourced it.
If your billing automation relies on agents like this that need continuous context syncing, you’re either at the bleeding edge or about to have a very expensive incident when the LLM hallucinates a refund policy too.
Our verdict: MCPs are a first-step towards real APIs. Let’s wait and see.
😶 THE SILENT TREATMENT
Stripe (beyond Copilot), Chargebee, Recurly, Maxio, Younium, Zoho, Frisbii, LedgerUp, Alguna, Paid, Solvimon, Stigg, Autumn, Amberflo, Paddle - are all quiet these past two weeks.
No launches. No hires. No drama. Not yet, anyway.
Probably heads-down shipping something big (or heads-down fixing something broken).
🏆 THE MOST BORING UPDATE AWARD
Maxio claims “Best Places to Work” for their Atlanta location.
Honestly, this is the corporate equivalent of putting “team player” on your resume. Nobody cares.
Our final word this week
“We’re mature now” (Lago, Orb)
“Usage pricing was oversold” (Zuora) - We spent years telling you subscriptions were the thing, then subscriptions were dead, and now we’re admitting hybrid models are the only thing that works because “just” usage scares CFOs.
— The Billing Bird