AI Summary
About
Togai is usage-based metering and billing infrastructure for B2B companies. It ingests monetizable events, lets teams configure any pricing model (usage, seat, subscription, hybrid) through a pricing orchestrator, manages entitlements, applies credits, discounts, minimum commitments, flat fees and add-ons, and generates invoices with usage and revenue dashboards — so a vendor can launch and iterate packaging without re-engineering its quote-to-cash stack. Notably, Togai’s own pricing is not charged per user: every plan advertises unlimited users, and cost scales on metered event volume and invoice value instead.
Togai was founded in 2022 in Chennai, India by Abhishek Rajagopal (CEO), Aravind Sriraman, and Tholkappiyan Velavan. In June 2023 it raised a $3.1 million seed round led by Together Fund, with BoldCap, Core91 VC, and Rippling co-founder Prasanna Shankar participating. On April 30, 2024, Zuora — the NYSE-listed monetization-suite vendor — announced a definitive agreement to acquire Togai to extend its billing and revenue platform with metering and rating; the deal was expected to close in May 2024 and terms were not disclosed. The product now operates as “Togai by Zuora,” with offices listed in Redwood City, California and Chennai, India. Named competitors on its own site include Metronome, Orb, Amberflo, Chargebee, and Maxio.
Togai’s own pricing is gated. The public pricing page advertises only a genuinely free Starter tier (“Get started for free,” no credit card) and a sales-quoted Enterprise plan (“Get Custom Quote”) — no platform fee, no per-event rate, and no volume tables are disclosed. This blueprint records exactly what is visible and marks every undisclosed figure as gated, never estimated.
Pricing summary : a free Starter tier and a sales-quoted Enterprise plan
Togai packages its own product into two families with no published dollar amounts, consistent with its gated, sales-led pricing posture. The header sets the model in one line: “Start for free today. Pick a plan later — unlimited users, access to all features in all plans, no upfront charges.”
- Starter — free. “Get started for free,” no credit card required. Includes the complete metering suite, pricing orchestrator, entitlements, multi-currency, credits, discounts, minimum commitments, flat fees, add-ons, invoice generation, usage and revenue dashboards, and basic support. Togai describes Starter’s billing as a platform fee that follows event volume and invoice value (a pay-as-you-go shape).
- Enterprise — sales-quoted (“Get Custom Quote”). “For growth-stage companies and enterprises. No cap on volume of events or invoice amounts.” Everything in the (referenced-but-uncarded) Standard plan, plus unlimited events, an implementation service with dedicated solution engineers, dedicated support, and custom integrations.
The defining dimension is what Togai does not charge on: users. Cost scales on the volume of metered events and the cumulative value of invoices raised, so this is a usage-based pricing model on billing events rather than per-seat licensing — the FAQ states plainly that “our pricing is not dependent on the number of users.”
What makes this different: A billing-infrastructure vendor whose own pricing is entirely gated — it sells the ability to meter and price on consumption, yet keeps every one of its own rates behind a custom quote, and gives away the full feature set for free at the entry tier.
Pricing by product
Togai platform (plan families)
| Tier | Price | Included | Key mechanics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free | All features: complete metering suite, pricing orchestrator, entitlements, multi-currency, credits, discounts, minimum commitments, flat fees, add-ons, invoice generation, usage & revenue dashboards, basic support; unlimited users | Free self-serve entry, no credit card; platform fee follows event volume + invoice value |
| Enterprise | Get Custom Quote | Everything in Standard, plus unlimited events, an implementation service with dedicated solution engineers, dedicated support, and custom integrations; unlimited users | Sales-quoted; “no cap on volume of events or invoice amounts” |
No platform fee, per-event rate, invoice-value tier table, or commit minimum is published for either plan — the Enterprise plan is quoted entirely through the “Get Custom Quote” / Contact Sales flow. A “Standard” plan is referenced in the FAQ (“For the Standard plan, the pricing will depend on the number of events and the cumulative invoice amount”) and in the Enterprise card’s “Everything in Standard +” badge, but it has had no tier card of its own in any archived snapshot. Undisclosed figures are recorded as gated, not estimated.
Sales motions across products: self-serve / PLG for the free Starter tier; sales-led for the Enterprise plan (quoted via the “Get Custom Quote” / Contact Sales flow).
Hidden costs : what a Togai bill actually contains
Because Togai publishes no public rates, a precise bill cannot be reconstructed from list prices — every Enterprise figure is quoted through the Contact Sales flow, and even the free Starter tier’s pay-as-you-go platform fee is only defined in words (“based on the volume of events for metering and value of invoice raised for billing”). The biggest hidden cost with a developer-first metering platform is rarely the line item on the invoice; it is the engineering and implementation time to wire usage events in and keep pricing logic running.
A representative mid-market SaaS vendor evaluating the Enterprise plan should expect the following cost shape (dollar values are gated and shown as quoted/unknown — this table sets the categories, not the prices):
| Line item | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Platform fee (scales with metered event volume) | Quoted by sales |
| Invoice-value component (scales with cumulative invoice amount raised) | Quoted by sales |
| Implementation service (dedicated solution engineers, custom integrations) | Included in Enterprise (scope-dependent) |
| Engineering time to instrument and send monetizable events | Internal cost (not on invoice) |
| Finance/ops dependence on engineering for new pricing configurations | Internal cost (not on invoice) |
| Estimated total | Gated — depends on event volume + invoice value + implementation scope |
Two structural traps deserve attention. First, Togai bills on two axes at once — event volume and invoice value — so a customer that processes high-value invoices can see costs rise even if raw event counts stay flat; budget for the cost unpredictability that two-dimensional usage metering creates. Second, because it is a developer-first metering engine, instrumenting events and configuring billable metrics takes engineering effort up front, which is why the implementation service (with dedicated solution engineers) is bundled into Enterprise. See how usage-based pricing reshapes the finance team’s workload for how that dependence compounds.
Want to estimate your own Togai bill? Use the Togai pricing calculator to model your costs based on metered event volume and invoice value.
Pricing evolution : Togai pricing history and changes
Togai has never published a dollar amount on its own pricing surfaces. Across every archived snapshot from October 2023 onward, the structure has been the same — a free Starter tier and a custom-quote Enterprise tier, both with all features and unlimited users. What changed was the company around the page (a seed round, then a Zuora acquisition), not the published rates, of which there are none to track.
Cadence
| Quarter | Price changes | Product / SKU additions | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 Q2 | 0 | 0 | $3.1M seed round led by Together Fund announced 2023-06-06 (corporate event, not a price change). |
| 2023 Q4 | 0 | 0 | Gated two-tier layout confirmed in archives (free Starter + custom Enterprise; “Standard” referenced but uncarded). No dollar amounts. |
| 2024 Q2 | 0 | 0 | Zuora acquisition announced 2024-04-30; post-acquisition site refresh (expanded nav, competitor pages) with pricing structure unchanged. |
| 2026 Q2 | 0 | 0 | ”Togai by Zuora” branding; same free Starter + sales-quoted Enterprise, still no published rates. |
Tracked range: 2023–present. Quarters not listed above were verified stable (0 price changes, 0 SKU additions). No dollar amount has ever been published, so there are no recorded price moves to track.
Notable changes
- 2023-06-06 — Togai raises a $3.1M seed round led by Together Fund (BoldCap, Core91 VC, and Rippling co-founder Prasanna Shankar participating); funds earmarked for product and geographic expansion (Inc42 / The SaaS News).
- 2023-10-03 — Archived pricing page confirms the gated two-tier structure: free Starter (full feature set) + custom-quote Enterprise; a “Standard” plan is referenced in the FAQ and the “Everything in Standard +” badge but has no card (Wayback snapshot).
- 2024-04-30 — Zuora announces a definitive agreement to acquire Togai; deal expected to close in May 2024, terms not disclosed (Zuora newsroom; Inc42, 2024-05-02).
- 2024-06-13 — Post-acquisition site refresh adds an expanded navigation and competitor-comparison pages; the free Starter + custom Enterprise pricing structure is unchanged (Wayback snapshot).
- 2026-06-03 — Pricing page captured as “Togai by Zuora” with the same two gated families and no published dollar amounts.
The Zuora acquisition in detail
On April 30, 2024 — roughly two years after founding and about ten months after its seed round — Zuora announced a definitive agreement to acquire Togai. Zuora positioned the deal as extending its monetization suite (Billing, Revenue, Payments, Zephr, Platform) with Togai’s “sophisticated metering and rating,” to be offered both as a standalone usage product and integrated with Zuora’s existing consumption solution. Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo framed it as accelerating usage-based models; Togai CEO Abhishek Rajagopal cited “deep metering and rating with the scale of Zuora’s end-to-end monetization technology.” Financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal was expected to close in May 2024.
Materially for pricing, the acquisition changed the brand wrapper but not the published economics: through mid-2024 and into 2026, Togai’s pricing page kept its free Starter tier, its custom-quote Enterprise tier, and its zero-dollar-disclosure posture. The only visible artifact of the deal on the pricing surface is the “Togai by Zuora” logo and a US (Redwood City) office now listed alongside the original Chennai address.
What’s unique : Togai’s distinctive pricing mechanics
1. The full feature set is free at the entry tier. Unlike most billing-infra vendors that ladder features across paid tiers, Togai’s free Starter plan ships everything — the complete metering suite, pricing orchestrator, entitlements, multi-currency, credits, discounts, minimum commitments, flat fees, add-ons, invoice generation, and dashboards. The only things gated behind Enterprise are scale and service (unlimited events, implementation engineers, dedicated support), not capability. This is an aggressive free-tier-led adoption motion for a developer-first platform.
2. Two-dimensional usage billing: events and invoice value. Togai’s own platform fee scales on the volume of metered events and the cumulative value of invoices raised through it. Charging on the customer’s monetized output (invoice value) — not just input (events) — is a value-metric choice that aligns Togai’s revenue with its customers’ revenue, but it also makes the bill move on two axes at once.
3. Explicitly seat-decoupled. Every plan advertises unlimited users, and the FAQ states pricing “is not dependent on the number of users.” For a tool whose buyers (engineering, finance, GTM) would otherwise multiply seats, removing per-user friction is a deliberate land-and-expand lever — see credit-based and consumption billing models for the broader pattern of decoupling price from headcount.
4. Total price opacity by a pricing company. Togai sells the machinery for transparent, configurable, usage-based pricing — yet publishes none of its own numbers. The free tier removes the need to disclose entry pricing, and the Enterprise tier hides it behind a quote. It is the same gated posture seen across the metering-infra category (Metronome, Orb).
Strengths & weaknesses
| Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|
| Genuinely free Starter tier with the entire feature set and no credit card — minimal friction to try | Zero published rates: no platform fee, no per-event price, no invoice-value tiers — buyers cannot self-qualify on cost |
| Seat-decoupled pricing (unlimited users) removes per-user friction for cross-functional teams | Two-dimensional billing (events + invoice value) makes the eventual quote harder to predict |
| Pricing scales with customer’s monetized output (invoice value), aligning vendor and customer incentives | Developer-first metering means engineering effort to instrument events before value is realized |
| Backed and now owned by Zuora — enterprise credibility, integration with a full monetization suite | Acquisition introduces roadmap/continuity questions for the standalone Togai product |
| Full configurability (any pricing model, entitlements, credits, discounts, commitments) even on free | ”Standard” plan referenced but never carded — pricing tier story is incomplete on its own page |
Billing UX : Togai billing controls and transparency
These describe the controls Togai gives its customers for running their own billing (the product), since Togai’s own pricing UX is limited to a “Get started for free” button and a “Get Custom Quote” / Contact Sales form.
- Pricing orchestrator — Configure any pricing model (usage, seat, subscription, hybrid) with credits, discounts, minimum commitments, flat fees, and add-ons, without code changes per model.
- Complete metering suite — Ingest monetizable events, meter them, and apply rating/rules to turn raw usage into billable line items.
- Entitlements — Gate product access and limits tied to the plan a customer is on, managed alongside pricing.
- Invoice generation & multi-currency — Produce invoices in multiple currencies from metered usage and configured rates.
- Usage & revenue dashboards — Surface consumption and revenue analytics to finance and product teams.
- Integrations — Connect to downstream systems such as Zuora, Stripe, and Zoho Books; custom integrations are part of the Enterprise implementation service.
- Own-pricing transparency — Low: no rates, platform fee, or volume tiers are published for either Togai plan; the Enterprise quote is obtained only via Contact Sales, and a 24-hour response is promised.
Strategic wins : Why Togai’s pricing decisions worked
1. Free, full-featured Starter as the wedge
Giving away the entire feature set — not a crippled subset — lowers the barrier to instrumenting Togai into a real billing flow, where switching costs then accrue. For a metering platform that requires integration work, removing price and feature friction at the top of the funnel is the right usage-based pricing strategy: land on free, expand to Enterprise when event volume and invoice value grow past what self-serve covers.
2. Billing on invoice value, not just events
Tying its own platform fee to the cumulative value of invoices its customers raise aligns Togai’s revenue with its customers’ success — a textbook value-metric alignment that scales naturally as customers grow. It mirrors the broader shift toward outcome- and value-aligned pricing and away from flat seats.
3. Seat-decoupling to maximize internal spread
By making pricing independent of user count and advertising unlimited users, Togai removes the disincentive for finance, engineering, product, and GTM teams to all adopt the tool — the same move away from per-user licenses many modern infra vendors are making. Wider internal adoption deepens the integration and raises switching costs ahead of the Enterprise upsell.
4. An exit that validated the thesis
Being acquired by Zuora roughly two years after founding and ~10 months after a $3.1M seed is a strong outcome for a metering startup, and it slots Togai into a full monetization suite. Strategically, it signals that standalone metering/rating is valuable enough that an incumbent billing platform would rather buy than build it.
Areas to improve : Gaps in Togai’s pricing approach
1. Publish at least an indicative platform fee or starting band
A billing company that publishes zero of its own numbers is a credibility gap, especially when its pitch is pricing transparency. Even a “starts at $X/mo” band or a worked example of the event-volume + invoice-value formula would let buyers self-qualify before talking to sales, reducing the cost unpredictability that gated pricing creates. Competitors that show even partial rates set the bar.
2. Card the “Standard” plan or remove the reference
The pricing page references a “Standard” plan in both the FAQ and the Enterprise “Everything in Standard +” badge, yet no Standard card has ever appeared in any archived snapshot. Either surface a real Standard tier (with its own inclusions and the event/invoice formula) or strip the reference — the current state reads as an incomplete or stale pricing page.
3. Quantify the two-billing-axes formula
Charging on both event volume and invoice value is defensible, but leaving it entirely in prose (“depends on the number of events and the cumulative invoice amount”) makes budgeting hard. A published tier table, a calculator, or example scenarios would help finance teams forecast — the same predictability problem usage-based pricing creates for finance teams that Togai’s own product is meant to solve.
Key takeaways
- A free, full-featured tier can be the whole funnel. Togai gates scale and service, not capability — the free Starter ships every feature, which lowers adoption friction for a tool that requires integration. Reserve paywalls for volume and white-glove service when switching costs come from integration depth.
- Bill on the customer’s output, not just their input. Charging on invoice value (not only events) aligns the vendor’s revenue with the customer’s monetized success and scales as customers grow. Pick a value metric tied to realized value where you can.
- Decoupling price from seats widens internal adoption. Unlimited users removes the disincentive for cross-functional teams to all use the product, deepening integration before the upsell. Per-user pricing can quietly cap the very expansion you want.
- Gated pricing is the category norm — and the category weakness. Metering-infra vendors (Togai, Metronome, Orb) almost uniformly hide their own rates; the buyer who publishes even an indicative band stands out and earns trust.
- Standalone metering is acquisition bait. Togai’s sub-two-year exit to Zuora shows incumbents will buy a focused metering/rating engine rather than build it — a signal about where durable value sits in the billing stack.
UBP implications
- Two-dimensional metering raises the predictability bar. Billing on events and invoice value compounds variance; vendors that adopt multi-axis usage metrics owe buyers a forecastable formula, a calculator, or example scenarios, or they import the bill-shock risk that erodes trust.
- Free-tier feature completeness is a viable UBP wedge. When switching cost lives in integration depth rather than feature unlocks, giving away the full feature set on a usage-based free tier is a defensible land-and-expand play for infrastructure products.
- Transparency is a differentiator inside opaque categories. In a category where nearly every vendor gates rates, the UBP playbook reward goes to whoever first publishes an indicative price — turning the category’s shared weakness into a competitive edge.
Sources
- Togai pricing page (accessed 2026-06-03)
- Togai contact / custom-quote page (accessed 2026-06-03)
- Togai pricing page — Wayback snapshot 2023-10-03 (accessed 2026-06-03)
- Togai pricing page — Wayback snapshot 2024-06-13 (accessed 2026-06-03)
- Togai blog (accessed 2026-06-03)
Bottom line
Togai is usage-based metering and billing infrastructure — now “Togai by Zuora” — that gives away its full feature set on a free Starter tier and quotes its Enterprise plan entirely through sales. Its own pricing is a platform fee scaling on metered event volume and invoice value, with unlimited users and no published dollar amounts: a billing company that keeps every one of its own rates gated. Founded in Chennai in 2022, it raised $3.1M from Together Fund and was acquired by Zuora in 2024.
Want to compare Togai against other usage-based billing platforms? Browse the pricing blueprint, or see the deep dives on Metronome and Orb.
Pricing timeline : Major events on a vertical axis
Each milestone below corresponds to a public pricing change, product launch, or material adjustment. Major events use a filled marker; minor adjustments use a faded one.
Togai by Zuora — free Starter + sales-quoted Enterprise (no public rates)
Pricing page presents two families with no dollar amounts: a free Starter (platform-fee structure scaling on event volume and invoice value; all features; basic support) and an Enterprise quoted by sales ('Get Custom Quote') with unlimited events, an implementation service with dedicated solution engineers, dedicated support, and custom integrations. The logo now reads 'Togai by Zuora' and the footer lists both Redwood City, CA and Chennai, India offices.
Post-acquisition site refresh; pricing structure unchanged
Archived pricing page shows an expanded post-acquisition navigation (Industries, Teams, competitor comparison pages, Customer Stories) and a 'Subscribed Live' banner, but the pricing structure is unchanged: free Starter + custom-quote Enterprise, both with all features and unlimited users, still no published dollar amounts. (Wayback snapshot 2024-06-13.)
Zuora announces acquisition of Togai
Zuora announced a definitive agreement to acquire Togai to extend its monetization suite with metering and rating, offered both standalone and integrated with Zuora's consumption solution. Deal expected to close in May 2024; terms not disclosed. (Zuora newsroom, 2024-04-30; Inc42, 2024-05-02.)
Gated two-tier pricing: free Starter + custom Enterprise
Archived pricing page shows two tier cards with no dollar amounts: a free Starter ('Get started for free') carrying the full feature set (complete metering suite, pricing orchestrator, entitlements, multi-currency, credits, discounts, minimum commitments, flat fees, add-ons, invoice generation, usage and revenue dashboards, basic support) and an Enterprise ('Get Custom Quote') adding unlimited events, an implementation service with dedicated solution engineers, dedicated support, and custom integrations. A 'Standard' plan is referenced in the FAQ and the 'Everything in Standard +' badge but has no card of its own. (Wayback snapshot 2023-10-03.)
$3.1M seed round (Together Fund)
Togai raised a $3.1 million seed round led by Together Fund, with BoldCap, Core91 VC, and Rippling co-founder Prasanna Shankar participating. Funds earmarked for product development and geographic expansion. (Inc42 / The SaaS News, 2023-06-06.)
- · Togai is a billing company that publishes zero dollar amounts on its own pricing page — just a free Starter tier and a 'Get Custom Quote' Enterprise plan — even though its product exists to help other companies meter and price on usage.
- · Togai's own pricing scales on metered event volume and invoice value, not on seats: every plan advertises unlimited users, and the FAQ explicitly says pricing 'is not dependent on the number of users.'
- · Togai was acquired by NYSE-listed Zuora roughly two years after founding and about ten months after its $3.1M seed round — the pricing page logo now reads 'Togai by Zuora.'
Questions & answers
- How much does Togai cost?
- Togai does not publish dollar amounts. The pricing page lists a free Starter tier ('Get started for free', no credit card) and an Enterprise plan quoted by sales ('Get Custom Quote'). Togai's own pricing is a platform fee that scales with metered event volume and the value of invoices raised, not with user count.
- Does Togai offer a free tier?
- Yes. The Starter plan is genuinely free with no credit card required, and it includes the full feature set: the complete metering suite, pricing orchestrator, entitlements, multi-currency, credits, discounts, minimum commitments, flat fees, add-ons, invoice generation, usage and revenue dashboards, and basic support.
- What is the difference between Starter and Enterprise?
- Both tiers include all features and unlimited users. Enterprise ('Everything in Standard +') is aimed at growth-stage companies and enterprises with no cap on event volume or invoice amounts, and adds unlimited events, an implementation service with dedicated solution engineers, dedicated support, and custom integrations.
- Is Togai pricing usage-based or subscription?
- Togai's own pricing is a usage-based platform fee charged per month or year that depends on the number of metered events and the cumulative invoice value, not on the number of users. No per-event rate or platform fee is published — the figures are gated behind a custom quote.
- Is Togai part of Zuora?
- Yes. Zuora announced it would acquire Togai on April 30, 2024, with the deal expected to close in May 2024; terms were not disclosed. Togai now operates as 'Togai by Zuora' and still runs its own pricing page with the same free Starter and sales-quoted Enterprise plans.
- Does Togai charge per user?
- No. Togai explicitly advertises unlimited users on every plan and states its pricing is not dependent on the number of users — it scales on metered event volume and invoice value instead.