Half a year ago, I joined Pleo, a FinTech startup with around 15,000 customers (we’re always hiring at Pleo!). I joined to take on and further develop the billing infrastructure. When I joined, I was actually a bit concerned about the narrowness of the new role and the new team. I mean, really… How much […]| Arnon Shimoni
One user consumed tens of thousands in model usage on a $200 plan. That’s from Anthropic’s own admission when they killed Claude Code’s unlimited tier. Not $200 worth of usage. Tens of thousands of dollars on a $200/month plan. TechCrunch said Cursor hit $500 million ARR. Fastest growing application ever, but still losing money on […] The post The free tier death cult appeared first on Arnon Shimoni.| Arnon Shimoni
You know that feeling when you’re looking at your competitor’s pricing page and the math doesn’t add up? $9/month. Unlimited usage. Same features as your $900 enterprise plan. Your first thought: They’re burning VC money. Classic Silicon Valley playbook – grow at all costs, figure out margins later. You’ve seen this movie before. They’ll either […]| Arnon Shimoni
Last week, I met a founder who’d just lost a pretty big $2M deal to a 3-person startup with a half-finished product (I call these “3 Stanford grads in a trenchcoat”). He was annoyed they didn’t even have a basic dashboard or settings page. I think he wasn’t angry about losing the deal, but mostly […]| Arnon Shimoni
OKRs are a pain. Here's how you'll run your own OKR workshop, even if your team is remote.| Arnon Shimoni
You know that sinking feeling when a “promising” proof of concept drags on for months, burns through your engineering resources, and ends with “we need more time to evaluate”? Yeah. That’s the PoC death spiral. And I’m seeing so many agentic companies falling into this trap as we help them monetize their agents at Paid. […] The post Pricing AI Proofs-of-Concept: free pilots will kill you appeared first on Arnon Shimoni.| Arnon Shimoni
(Basically, why the octopus grew new tentacles for agentic billing) A while ago, I wrote about the 14 pains of building your own billing system – that was back when billing was “just” complicated. It got mentioned quite a bit around the internet, and ended up #2 on the front page of Hacker News which […]| Arnon Shimoni
The podcast setup at Get Paid was upgraded, focusing on quality and budget-friendly equipment for both remote and in-person interviews. Key choices included the Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K G2 for video, Shure MV7+ microphones for audio, and an organized storage solution. Comfort in the studio environment also significantly enhances interview quality.| Arnon Shimoni
We often neglect to consider how B2C billing at Spotify, Netflix, HelloFresh, ClassPass, and even ChatGPT work. Because it feels like a solved problem it is very often underestimated. Don't build it yourself.| Arnon Shimoni
In this part, we'll discuss narrowing down your OKR candidates and sharing them with your stakeholders.| Arnon Shimoni
Trying to cobble together your own billing system is like wrestling an octopus that's armed with tax codes and invoices instead of tentacles. It's a beast of complexity that can tangle up everything from customer support to compliance. I have 14 points on why it's hard.| Arnon Shimoni
Previously, I wrote about how important it is to Design your pricing and tools so you can adapt them later – now I want to give a little bit more material on that… I’m going to assume that you’re some sort of SaaS founder, or perhaps even a product manager for pricing, growth, or monetisation. […]| Arnon Shimoni
In this blog post I’ll talk about three pricing architecture concepts that I think are really important in modern billing – designing pricing and packaging to be adaptable. I’ll build upon the experience our billing infrastructure team had at Pleo, which has allowed us to expand to new geographies, currencies, and adapt pricing very rapidly. […]| Arnon Shimoni
Recently, at Pleo, we built a cashback system that uses our internal payments infrastructure, as well as Stripe. So while there are other components at play to actually move the money around, Stripe is what drives the cashback events for the most part. Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch, but it is doable! I’m […]| Arnon Shimoni
For a small project, I wanted to print some graphic receipts from a Raspberry Pi. I bought the cheapest one I could find on Amazon, the POS-5890K. (I paid €43 on Amazon.de). It’s not a very high quality device, but the price was hard to argue with. However, printing to it was a bit more […]| Arnon Shimoni
Running a company is hard. Running a modern, inclusive, sustainable, and authentic company is much harder. One of the reasons I joined Pleo, was because it was all of those things. It was a great breath of fresh air. But not all companies are like that. All is not lost though, because companies can and […]| Arnon Shimoni
Building your own entitlement service is key for supporting a modern, flexible SaaS product. Whenever I read about billing systems, there’s a lot of talk about the billing aspects but not so much around entitlements. In the spirit of sharing, and since I haven’t found any good articles about it, I decided to tell you […]| Arnon Shimoni
