This MGI 360 Rating™ and accompanying MarketLens™ are designed to help buyers, suppliers, and investors assess the product functionality, management teams, channel breadth, marketing strategy, and financial positioning of m3ter‘s agile billing software tool.
We initiate an MGI 360 Rating of m3ter in the Agile Billing Market with a 47 and a Neutral Analyst Outlook. Founded in 2020, m3ter is one of several newcomers to the Agile Billing market, a member of the subset MGI has informally titled “NextGen Billers.” The m3ter product primarily focuses on mediating various sources of billing data, metering and rating. The solution relies on external ERP solutions like NetSuite or broader billing products for invoicing. The product also has additional capabilities for analytics, price simulation, and usage forecasting. M3ter is aiming to push into use cases with higher volumes and speeds, but it is too early to tell if the product can effectively compete with some of the high-end enterprise options. The solution supports higher event volumes than most SME tools can handle for usage metering. However, it currently falls short of hyperscale use cases where volumes can go into billions of events per hour.
*This unlabeled Go-to-Market Strength vs. Solution Strength MarketLens highlights how agile billing vendors, including m3ter, compare with one another across a combination of key factors. M3ter’s go-to-market and solution strength are broken down in depth in the report. A fully labeled version of this MarketLens can be found inside the Agile Billing Top 50 Buyer’s Guide.
About m3ter
Founded in 2020 by ex-AWS technologists, m3ter offers usage-based billing functionality to early and growth stage companies. The company has raised $31.5 million in funding and is currently growing its customer base. The company has approximately 30 customers and a team of 50.
What Is Agile Billing?
Billing solutions support the quote-to-cash process and enable an organization to maintain complex product, price, offer, and customer hierarchies. MGI Research defines agile billing as billing solutions that are inherently intelligent and versatile in the way they are designed, implemented, and operated. The UX is modern and intuitive, making it much easier for a business user to manage and run the system. The solution can integrate with other sophisticated agile monetization tools and operate with minimal ongoing maintenance. Most, but not all, agile billing solutions are cloud-based and are applicable to a wide range of industries and use cases. Agile billing is a key element of the agile monetization platform.
Billing is at the core of pricing, packaging, and the customer experience. Done right, it can delight customers and burnish a positive brand experience. Done poorly, it damages customer, partner, and investor trust and even puts the business at risk. Unlike most technology investments, billing solutions can directly impact revenue growth, profitability, and competitive standing. For buyers, getting the right match between a billing system’s architecture and capabilities and its common use cases is essential to business success.
No organization wants to find itself limited in its business choices because its billing system cannot adequately support the desired business model. Finding the right solution fit for particular requirements makes the difference between smooth billing and project success, or customer losses, revenue shortfalls, and project failure.
This guide aims to inform anyone interested in billing – prospective buyers, customers, partners, investors – about the relative strengths, weaknesses, and ideal fit for each of the 50 leading vendors in agile billing.
Agile Billing Vendors Under Coverage
The Agile Billing Top 50 Buyer’s Guide provides ratings and analysis of the fifty most significant suppliers of agile billing software solutions. It includes MGI 360 Ratings™ of 35 suppliers and analysis of 15 honorable mention vendors. According to MGI Research, these are the most significant solutions and suppliers in the market today. Only the top vendors are included in this report. MGI 360 Ratings are calculated via a rigorous quantitative rating (scored 0-100). MGI 360 Rated™ suppliers are also given a letter grade based on quartile rating results, as well as a qualitative analyst outlook (positive, neutral, or negative).
The 35 vendors receiving full 360 Ratings and letter grades are: Aptitude, BillingPlatform, Binary Stream, BluLogix, Certinia, Chargebee, Cleeng, CSG, Evergent, Good Sign, Gotransverse, JustOn, LogiSense, m3ter, Maxio, Metronome, Monetize360, MonetizeNow, OneBill, Opencell, Oracle, Oracle NetSuite, Ordway, Recurly, RecVue, Rev.io, Sage Intacct, Salesforce, SAP, Stax Bill, Stripe, Subskribe, Workday, Zoho, and Zuora.
The 15 suppliers receiving honorable mention, but not rated for this report, are: Amberflo, Amdocs, Billsby, ChargeOver, DigitalRoute, Frisbii, HubSpot, Lago, MasterCard, Nitrobox, Nue.io, Orb, Paddle, Zenskar, and Zone & Co.
MGI Research tracks approximately 30 more vendors in this space and reserves the right to publish ratings and analyses on select vendors as deemed worthy and appropriate.
What Are MGI 360 Ratings?
MGI 360 Ratings™ are a comprehensive structured system for evaluating technology companies. The MGI 360 scores reflect analyst opinions based on a scale of 0 to 100, combined with an analyst outlook (Positive, Negative, or Neutral). The 360 Rating system is comprised of 149 unique data points across five pillars:
- PRODUCT: How strong is the product’s competitive position?
- MANAGEMENT: How competent and experienced is the management team?
- CHANNELS: Does the company have a sales capability and channels needed to bring products to market?
- STRATEGY: Does the company have a realistic view of the opportunity and a compelling strategy for success?
- FINANCE: Is the company growing and profitable?
360 Ratings in Agile Billing condense hours of research and customer references into simple, easy-to-understand ratings and recommendations to clearly demonstrate strengths, weaknesses, and differences among billing software vendors. All 360 Ratings in agile billing are available in the Agile Billing Top 50 Buyer’s Guide.
What are MGI MarketLens™ Reports?
The agile billing market is highly fragmented – while some solutions look similar on the surface, they address completely different use cases and buyer personas. MGI MarketLens™ charts plot suppliers using a pair of key coordinates to shed light on the variations among solutions in each market. They help prospective buyers, investors, and partners see where products align relative to core requirements.
There are four types of MGI MarketLens™ charts:
Go-to-Market Strength vs. Solution Strength: Solution Strength represents a supplier’s MGI 360™ Product score, while Go-to-Market Strength is a composite of the supplier’s MGI 360™ Management, Channels, Strategy, and Finance scores.
Agility vs. Complexity: Complexity refers to a solution’s ability to handle complex billing scenarios, while agility refers to a solution’s flexibility to deploy new pricing and billing strategies and introduce changes quickly.
Agility vs. Volume: Agility refers to a solution’s flexibility to deploy new pricing and billing strategies and introduce changes quickly, while volume refers to the volume of billing transactions a solution can handle.
Complexity vs. Volume: Complexity refers to a solution’s ability to handle complex billing scenarios, while volume refers to the volume of billing transactions a solution can handle.
Learn More
MGI clients can download the report below to find out how m3ter compares to peer averages in the agile billing market.
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