The post-acquisition hangover
The wire is quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that settles over an industry after a predator makes a kill.
The industry holds its breath
Stripe published their Metronome integration roadmap this week.
In their blog post, Stripe wrote: “We already support companies with a broad range of billing models, including credit burndown (Lovable), outcome-based billing (Intercom), and subscriptions (Anthropic).”
Read that again, because Stripe claims:
Credits? We do that. (Solvimon, Orb, Lago - you listening?)
Outcome-based? We do that. (Every “AI-native billing” vendor who made this their pitch - noted.)
Subscriptions? Obviously. (Chargebee, Recurly, Maxio, Zuora - welcome to commodity hell.)
This is Stripe telling the entire billing industry: “Whatever you think your differentiator is, we already have it. With Anthropic, Intercom, and Lovable as receipts”.
Billing vendors need to realise their positioning decks need rewriting. “We do credits better than Stripe” is a harder sell when Stripe is publicly naming Lovable as a credits customer.
✨ SHINY OBJECTS
Paddle’s Kitchen Sink Release While everyone else hid, Paddle shipped a bunch of stuff. Cardless trials, post-purchase upsell flows, etc.
The Bird’s Verdict: Paddle is betting the mid-market will need an alternative when Stripe’s enterprise focus intensifies.
🤫 THE SILENT TREATMENT
Missing in Action: Chargebee, Recurly, Lago, Orb, Zuora, Maxio, Amberflo, Younium, and basically everyone else this week.
The bird hopes that they’re furiously rewriting their pitch decks to answer “how are you different from Stripe now?” or they’re running fire drills on customer retention. When Stripe owns your biggest competitor’s metering layer, your enterprise sales calls just got way harder.
🐦 CRUMBS FROM THE WIRE
Little stories that are not that important.
Flexprice published a “hot take”: “Stripe’s Metronome acquisition makes open-source billing essential”. Sure, Jan.
Our Final Word
January is always slow, but this January is different slow.
As we stated last week, we still believe somewhere in San Francisco, an OpenAI finance lead is writing that business case for in-house billing.
— The Billing Bird
Short this week because the news is short.