Flat fee, banded by your scale
The billing-infrastructure and FinOps cohort is replacing percentage-of-revenue and percentage-of-spend take-rates with flat fees gated by a band of the customer's own scale — revenue, billings, tracked cloud spend, active contracts, billable end-customers, even website visitors — and four vendors now market "not a percentage of your revenue" as the headline claim. Hyperline's 2026-07-29 repricing is the first dated exit from a take-rate in the corpus, and only 2 of the 17 billing-tagged companies still publish a percentage (Stripe Billing 0.7%, Chargebee 0.75%). The mechanic is not free of percentages, though: Sequence's quoted tiers are still "a monthly platform fee on projected billed revenue," Finout's flat bands are reported to land at roughly 1% of the cloud bill, and Vantage keeps a savings-share on its Autopilot product while refusing one on its subscription — so the percentage often moves into the quote or onto the outcome rather than disappearing. If any of the ten restores a published take-rate — Orb already did the reverse move in 2024-11, adding billings as a primary metric after advertising that it charged no percentage of billings — or a new entrant wins share at a sub-0.5% rate the flat-fee cohort has to match, the "percentage is dead in billing software" claim breaks.
Evidence over time
10 supporting · 5 counter — hover or tap a point for detail, click to jump to the row.
Evidence
| Company | Date | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Hyperline | Jul 2026 | Abandoned its own take-rate. Before: Quote to Cash at $199/mo + 0.6% of billed revenue and Quote to Cash + Usage at $299/mo + 0.7%. After: a flat Launch tier at $599/month covering up to $2M in annual revenue and up to 100 active contracts, with Growth ($2M–$20M revenue, up to 1,000 contracts) and Scale (above $20M, unlimited contracts) custom-quoted. The public "10 invoices free, no credit card" trial went with it, so there is no longer a free tier. Hyperline's own framing: the prior 0.6/0.7% "alone could add hundreds to thousands of dollars a month once billed revenue climbed into six figures." |
| Kill Bill | Jun 2026 | Explicitly anti-percentage. pricing_model reads "flat-annual-fee support (Launch/Growth/ Enterprise) — explicitly never a % of revenue," and the pricing page ships a savings calculator: at $25M ARR a customer-managed package runs ~$12k Aviate software + $38k–$63k Growth Support = ~$50k–$75k/yr, versus ~$175k for a typical competitor charging 0.7% of revenue. The open-source engine itself (Apache-2.0) is free to self-host with no meter at all; the AWS Marketplace deploy is ~$40/mo plus your own AWS cost. |
| Zenskar | Jun 2026 | Three custom-quoted tiers (Starter, Standard, Enterprise) carrying the full feature set and priced by scale and support — with a dedicated pricing-page section headed "No percentage of your revenue" and an FAQ that states flatly "We don't charge a % of your revenue," aimed at Stripe Billing, Zuora and Chargebee. No dollar figures are published; third-party estimates (~$15K–$100K/yr) are contradictory and unconfirmed. |
| Vantage | Jun 2026 | Fixed-rate tiers gated by monitored cloud spend, not a cut of it: free Starter up to $2,500/mo of tracked spend (3 users, 6-month retention), Pro up to $7,500 (5 users), Business up to $20,000 (10 users, 12-month retention), Enterprise custom for unlimited spend. Frontmatter states the platform fee is "NOT a percentage-of-spend meter." The paid dollar figures (~$30 and ~$200/mo) are third-party reported, not published. Percentage economics survive only in the optional Autopilot for AWS Savings Plans, which earns on realized savings. |
| Sequence | Jun 2026 | Banded by the customer's ARR: a public Growth plan at $799/mo for startups under $1M ARR, then bespoke Core ($1–10M ARR) and Scale ($10M+ ARR). Add-ons are separate — the CPQ quote builder and revenue recognition start at $499/mo, so a full quote-to-revenue deployment on Growth raises the floor from $799 to roughly $1,300/mo, and rev-rec is gated to Core and above. Important dent: the bespoke tiers are explicitly "a monthly platform fee on projected billed revenue," so the percentage logic moved into the quote rather than off the price card. Re-verified 2026-07-21 with no separate SKU for the AI agent layer. |
| Maxio | Jul 2026 | Flat fee banded by monthly billings: Grow at $599/mo up to $100k in monthly billings (badged "Most popular"), quote-only Scale above that for advanced rev-rec, A/R, multi-entity and metering. Explicitly no per-seat charges. On 2026-07-23 the page slimmed to just those two plans — the free "Build" developer-sandbox column was removed as a listed plan (it still exists as a footer resource) — with prices unchanged. |
| Flexprice | Jul 2026 | The cleanest fully published band ladder in the set, gating one flat fee on multiple independent scale dimensions at once: Free (100k events/mo, up to $100K cumulative billing revenue), Build $500/mo (1M events, up to $250K cumulative OR $20K monthly billings), Scale $1,000/mo (5M events, up to $1.2M cumulative OR $100K monthly billings), plus a custom Mission Critical tier. The 2026-07-06 change added the $100K billings cap to the free tier — extending the double meter all the way down — and moved Scale's sign-up to sales-assisted ("Contact Us" instead of "Get Started") while leaving its $1,000/mo list price published. All list prices ($500 / $1,000 / Custom) unchanged; self-hosting stays free under AGPLv3. |
| Finout | Jun 2026 | Flat annual subscription tiered by committed cloud spend rather than metered on it, reported at roughly 1% of the cloud bill: Business ~$1,000/mo up to ~$500k of spend, Pro ~$2,000/mo up to ~$2M, Enterprise custom. Frontmatter is explicit that it is "not a per-usage meter." All figures are third-party reported — Finout publishes no price list. |
| Schematic | Jun 2026 | Bands on the customer's own billable end-customers: Free $0 (10 monetized subscriptions, 500K events/mo), Growth $200/mo (100 monetized subscriptions, 10M events/mo), quoted Enterprise on volume pricing bands with unlimited events. Seats are unlimited on every tier. The band edge is enforced as a hard product gate, not an overage line: cross the free monetized-subscription limit and your own customers can no longer check out to a paid plan. |
| Docket | Jun 2026 | The same "size of your business" logic outside fintech: an all-inclusive annual subscription banded on the customer's website traffic — Growth from $3K/mo up to 20,000 monthly visitors, Scale from $4K/mo for 20,000–100,000 visitors (the "most popular" tier), Enterprise custom above 100,000. No seat fees and no conversation caps; unlimited conversations and integrations are bundled into the traffic band. The flattest band curve in the set — a 5x visitor range for a 1.33x price step. |
Counterexamples
- Stripe Billing · Jul 2026 — The load-bearing holdout: still a pure percentage at 0.7% of Billing volume for recurring subscriptions and 0.4% per paid invoice on Invoicing Starter, layered on top of standard payment-processing fees. On 2026-07-22 Stripe *unbundled* advanced usage-based billing into Metronome (Startup: a $100,000 billing allotment + 10M usage events; Custom quoted) rather than flattening the fee — basic metering stays inside Billing via the Meters API up to 100M events/mo. The take-rate survives where it rides payment rails.
- Chargebee · Jun 2026 — Runs both mechanics at once, which is the honest middle case: Starter is free for the first USD 250K of *cumulative* billing and then 0.75% on billing, while Performance is a banded flat fee at USD 7,188/yr (USD 599/mo, annual commitment) covering up to USD 100K billing/mo, and Enterprise is quoted. No overage rate is published above the Performance cap. A percentage bolted onto a banded flat fee, not replaced by it.
- Orb · Jun 2026 — Moved the opposite way, and reversed its own marketing to do it. Through 2024-08 Orb billed purely on monthly event volume and its FAQ stated invoicing was included "without charging a percentage of billings"; by 2024-11 it had added billings — a cut of total invoice value issued through Orb — as a primary metric alongside events, plus a platform fee on Advanced and Enterprise. As of 2026-06-02 all three tiers are "Custom pricing" with no dollar amounts, so the take-rate is now entirely behind a quote. In the corpus's monetization signals Orb is named by 8 companies — tied with Metronome, and behind only Stripe Billing's 18.
- Usage AI · Jul 2026 — Percentage pricing is *expanding* in outcome-linked FinOps even as it retreats in billing software. Usage AI runs a pure savings-share — 20% of realized EC2 savings and 35% on RDS/ElastiCache/Redshift/OpenSearch per its AWS Marketplace listing — with no platform fee, no minimum and no contract, billed only when savings land. The 2026-07-23 redesign pulled the fee number off its own site entirely, leaving the Marketplace listing as the only published rate.
- Puzzle · Jul 2026 — Abandoned the band in the other direction. Puzzle gated five tiers on annual-expense bands in 2025-01 (Free under $25k, Basic $25/mo under $25k, Starter $50/mo under $100k, Pro $100/mo under $1M, Advanced custom) and used a $20k transaction-volume gate in mid-2026 — then on 2026-07-21 replaced the customer-scale gate entirely with a vendor-indexed "Starter is free for 2 months" promo against a $25/mo list price. It swapped a customer-indexed trigger for a clock, the reverse of this trend's mechanic.
Trivia
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One number ties three vendors together: 0.7%. Kill Bill's own pricing page (2026-06-10) ships a calculator arguing that a $25M-ARR customer pays roughly $50k–$75k/yr flat (~$12k Aviate software + $38k–$63k Growth Support) versus ~$175k for "a 0.7%-of-revenue competitor" — a $110k+ gap that widens with growth. 0.7% is exactly the rate Stripe Billing still charges on Billing volume, and exactly the rate Hyperline abandoned on 2026-07-29. The cohort's marketing and its holdout are arguing over the same basis point.
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Banding does not actually eliminate the percentage — it just makes it lumpy. Finout (2026-06-10) sells a flat annual subscription tiered by committed cloud spend that is reported to land at roughly 1% of the customer's cloud bill (~$1,000/mo up to ~$500k of spend, ~$2,000/mo up to ~$2M). Same outcome as a take-rate, delivered as a step function, with the vendor absorbing the variance inside each band.
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Vantage (2026-06-10) runs both philosophies in one company: its frontmatter states the platform fee is "NOT a percentage-of-spend meter," with fixed tiers gated at $2,500 / $7,500 / $20,000 of monitored monthly spend — yet its optional Autopilot for AWS Savings Plans still earns a cut of realized savings. The percentage did not die; it moved off the subscription and onto the outcome, which is precisely where Usage AI's 20%-of-EC2-savings model is expanding.