Modern Monetization - How Metronome Powers Real-Time Billing with Confluent

Explore how modern SaaS companies can transform usage data into revenue at lightning speed in this 45-minute conference talk featuring Cosmo Wolfe, CTO at Metronome, and Joseph Morais from Confluent. Discover how Metronome has built a real-time monetization engine that processes billions of events daily and generates tens of thousands of invoices per second using Confluent's data streaming platform and Apache Kafka. Learn about achieving sub-second billing latency, implementing real-time fraud detection, and how data streaming enables new pricing models and product-led growth strategies. Understand why "time to revenue" has become the critical metric for SaaS success and how real-time monetization requires a robust data streaming foundation. Gain insights into how Confluent's managed platform allows 90% of Metronome's engineering team to focus on feature development rather than infrastructure management. The discussion covers the technical architecture behind processing events with second-level latency end-to-end, the importance of high-cardinality data support, and how real-time data becomes essential when monetization is integrated into core product experiences. Perfect for engineering leaders, product managers, and anyone involved in billing systems, pricing strategies, or SaaS business models who want to understand how to leverage streaming data as a competitive advantage.