At a glance
Stripe is the world's best usage-based billing platform for SaaS and AI companies. But unless companies have scalable entitlement infrastructure, real pricing agility is always blocked by dev sprints and code changes. More teams are turning to Schematic + Stripe to unlock true pricing agility — Stripe for usage-based & hybrid billing at scale, Schematic for the entitlement layer that makes pricing & packaging changes safe, easy, and fast.
This case study walks through Plotly’s journey and why Stripe + Schematic provided the ideal architecture for their next chapter.
Plotly’s next chapter
Plotly is best known for Dash, the open-source framework used by thousands of data teams to build interactive analytics apps. Their next chapter is Plotly Cloud, a cloud based, AI-powered environment where users can upload datasets and “vibe code” dashboards directly in the browser.
The product represents a big shift for Plotly. Their traditional offering was on-prem with a strong enterprise user base. Plotly Cloud brings their technology to a broader audience. That move to the cloud meant new usage-based billing needs and support for both product-led sales and enterprise sales.
Plotly already relied on Stripe for subscriptions in its enterprise business, but the new model raised a question: how should the company approach billing and monetization in this next chapter of hybrid pricing and hybrid selling across multiple products?
Knowing full-well that consideration would require input from product, engineering, finance, and GTM, Plotly began interviewing vendors in the quickly growing usage-based billing space. Initially, the buying committee thought platforms like Orb and Metronome seemed like the right direction for their ability to handle usage-based billing at scale. This thinking changed after a demo with Schematic.
The evaluation: usage-based billing startups vs. Stripe Billing and agile pricing architecture
Schematic presented 3 options to Plotly’s cross-functional team, representing engineering, product, finance, and sales, including CEO Jim Mcintosh:
Use Stripe Billing
Use Orb/Metronome
Use Stripe Billing + Schematic
“The Schematic team did a great job of opening our eyes to how to think about our initiatives and get ahead of problems we’d encounter,” said Nathan Drezner, lead product director at Plotly. “One of the main takeaways was that we really had two considerations in play: the first were the requirements for the billing platform best suited for this next chapter of growth; and the second was our product architecture to support pricing and packaging agility.”
The benefits of option 3 (Stripe Billing and Schematic) would be the scale and power of Stripe billing, payments, tax, combined with the flexibility to iterate on pricing and packaging without code changes delivered by Schematic’s decoupled entitlements layer.
As the team explored, they realized Stripe Billing could solve their usage-based billing requirements and that Schematic, which deeply integrates with Stripe billing, provided a way for product & growth to control and iterate how the product would be monetized – features, limits, seats – without code changes. This combination leveraged Stripe as the billing system and Schematic to make it 10x easier to test and adapt monetization for the new product.
During a demo, Ben Prosthlewaite, Plotly’s VP Eng had the ‘aha’ moment that moved the buying committee toward Stripe + Schematic: “This makes sense. So without Schematic, enforcing feature entitlements, limits, and access logic is on us to own. Yeah, this is a ton of technical debt waiting to happen that will constantly pull our developers into billing work we shouldn’t be doing. And I know it’s slowing down product and sales.”
Companies often assume that their lack of pricing agility is a billing platform issue, when in reality it’s a product architecture issue — specifically, a lack of entitlement infrastructure that is decoupled from both application code and billing.
The solution: Stripe for billing, Schematic for entitlements
Plotly’s new setup cleanly split responsibilities:
Stripe serves as the payments and billing infrastructure, managing payments, usage-based invoicing, revenue recognition, and tax.
Schematic is the product and engineering facing infrastructure to decouple billing from code and manage entitlements scalably
Ben’s statement during the demo was an important moment, because it illustrated to Plotly’s team the power of using Stripe and Schematic together and the cross-functional advantages the team would accrue, namely:
No need to migrate to a new billing platform
No need to build and maintain an entitlements service, which would be an infinite roadmap of billing-related work
No technical debt caused by entitlements, hard-coded and tightly coupled to billing
Product and sales could control trials, credits, usage data, custom deals, expansion triggers, and more without code changes unlocking speed to market and revenue agility.
Product & eng could use Schematic to control how their products would be gated, metered, and enforced, while Finance could use Stripe Billing to handle all billing & invoicing.
The rollout: from “all you can use” to credits in 2 weeks
Implementation took 2 weeks, beginning with a simple “all-you-can-use” model to validate demand. Plotly has already shifted to a usage-based model and is planning to introduce a credit-based model shortly.
The key benefit was speed. Without having to build an entitlement layer to handle monetization for the new product, Plotly shipped Studio a quarter earlier than they’d anticipated.
From there, the product team used Schematic ship pricing experiments and entitlement updates without redeploying code. Engineering could focus on the core product itself instead of maintaining billing logic.
As Nathan Drezner, product director at Plotly said,“Literally 10 minutes from idea to production is just awesome! Making a change like this, so quickly, is THRILLING.”
Pricing agility = revenue agility
For SaaS and AI, Stripe sets the standard for usage-based billing. Yet pricing can’t truly move fast unless entitlements are scalable and decoupled.
Stories like Plotly’s show how Stripe and Schematic together can deliver fast-moving companies the billing architecture required to treat pricing like product – a lever of continuous iteration and adaptation.
In a world of varied inference costs, hybrid pricing, hybrid billing, and multi-product offerings, one thing is certain: pricing agility = revenue agility. Plotly is proving this.