In the early days of SaaS, billing was a back-office task - owned by finance, implemented by engineering, and mostly invisible to the product. The goal was simple: send invoices, collect money, stay compliant. These early "OG billing teams" were often siloed, reactive, and oriented around revenue collection, not enablement.
But SaaS businesses have changed. Companies are no longer just selling licenses or subscriptions; they’re delivering value in increasingly personalized, dynamic ways - usage-based pricing, outcome-driven models, and hybrid go-to-market motions that span PLG and enterprise sales. As a result, product lines are expanding, pricing strategies are diversifying, and monetization is becoming a core part of product strategy.
Billing systems - designed for simpler times - started to crack under the pressure. It wasn’t just about charging a customer anymore. It was about supporting the complexity of a global, multi-SKU product business at scale.
Inside companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, Twilio, Atlassian, and DocuSign, a new kind of team began to emerge: the Commerce Platform team.
Unlike traditional billing or RevOps, these teams aren’t just optimizing payment flows. They’re building product infrastructure - deeply technical platforms that support:
- Complex packaging and pricing models
- Dynamic entitlements and provisioning
- Experimentation across GTM motions (PLG + sales-led)
- Governance, versioning, and compatibility across SKUs
- Real-time sync between product, finance, and customer experience
They solve a fundamentally different problem: monetizing a large, complex, ever-evolving product catalog.
From OG Billing to Commerce: A Shift in Mandate
Let’s be clear: traditional billing systems were never designed to handle this.
They’re optimized for the last mile of monetization - invoicing, payments, tax. But they start to break when faced with:
- 100s of SKUs, many of which are interdependent
- Constant packaging changes tied to go-to-market strategy
- Entitlements that span products, regions, and roles
- Custom pricing or fulfillment logic for enterprise contracts
- Multiple versions of the same product, each with unique constraints
- Requirements for backward/forward compatibility, lineage, and reporting
This is where “just use Stripe” or “build a few scripts” hits a wall - because stitching together billing, CPQ, finance, and reporting systems with scripts and workflows becomes unmanageable at scale.
What’s needed is a Commerce Platform that sits between the product and the billing system - an orchestrating logic built for scale, flexibility, and product velocity.
From Billing to Commerce: The Evolution of Monetization Teams
In many organizations, traditional billing teams focus on the post-sale process: generating invoices, handling payment gateways, and integrating with ERP systems. But large enterprises and hypergrowth businesses, this approach begins to break down. When packaging changes become code changes, and every new pricing test requires a cross-functional fire drill, billing becomes a bottleneck.
When packaging changes become code changes, and every new pricing test requires a cross-functional fire drill, billing becomes a bottleneck.
Commerce Platform teams take a fundamentally different approach. These teams are deeply cross-functional. They own infrastructure that supports:
- Dynamic pricing and packaging
- Usage metering and real-time entitlements
- Self-serve upgrades and trials
- Experimentation across multiple sales motions
Their focus is speed, flexibility, and abstraction. They allow product teams to ship faster, sales teams to close more efficiently, and finance teams to operate with clarity.
Atlassian, selling multiple products to overlapping customer bases through both PLG and enterprise motions, needs to support complex packaging and evolving SKUs without friction.
At Twilio, where monetization is closely tied to developer workflows, enabling programmable and flexible pricing models is critical.
DocuSign, as it expanded beyond e-signature to a broader agreement cloud and global markets, faced mounting complexity in pricing localization and bundling.
In all of these cases, the Commerce Platform team isn't just maintaining billing infrastructure - they're enabling the business to adapt quickly to changing go-to-market needs, support increasingly complex monetization strategies, and deliver a consistent experience across touchpoints.
Scaling Complexity Demands a Commerce Platform Approach
As companies grow, their monetization needs evolve-and complexity increases quickly. What starts as a simple monthly subscription for a single product can quickly expand into a portfolio of SKUs, usage-based pricing, tiered plans, region-specific models, and custom enterprise agreements.
To support this, many companies patch together early infrastructure: their billing engine (like Stripe or Zuora), Salesforce for CPQ, NetSuite for finance, Snowflake for analytics - all glued with scripts and manual processes.
Each change - whether it’s a new SKU, plan version, or pricing test - requires updating logic across multiple systems. Entitlements are synced manually (or worse, not at all). Finance builds their own view of revenue in Snowflake. Sales has limited visibility into what the customer actually bought. And engineering becomes the bottleneck for every packaging iteration.
Over time, the glue holding them together becomes the source of fragility.
Commerce Platform teams help avoid these pitfalls by introducing a dedicated layer for managing monetization logic. This makes it easier to iterate on pricing, launch new offerings, and adapt to different customer segments without placing a heavy burden on engineering or product.
For companies looking to grow efficiently and move quickly, building a Commerce Platform early is less about long-term optimization and more about staying agile in the face of growing demands.
For companies looking to grow efficiently and move quickly, building a Commerce Platform early is less about long-term optimization and more about staying agile in the face of growing demands.
Adapting to the New Norms of AI-Driven Monetization
Pricing has become a strategic differentiator.
The companies moving fastest today aren’t just innovating on product - they’re innovating on how they price, package, and deliver that product. For engineering leaders working closely with finance, product, and the C-suite, monetization infrastructure is no longer a backend afterthought. It’s a high-leverage lever for revenue growth, market segmentation, and speed of execution.
We’re in the middle of a major shift. Traditional subscription models are no longer enough. Pricing is becoming more dynamic, personalized, and outcome-driven - and AI is accelerating that change.
It is disrupting everything we thought we knew about how to sell and monetize software.
Today’s AI-powered products challenge legacy pricing assumptions. Companies are experimenting with:
- Outcome-based pricing (value delivered, not time elapsed)
- Usage tied to model inference costs
- Work-based models based on productivity gains
But new pricing models introduce a cascade of new challenges:
- How do you meter what counts as an “outcome”?
- How do you price fairly when usage patterns spike or dip unpredictably?
- How do you maintain visibility and auditability in systems where decisions are partially opaque?
At the same time, buyers are getting smarter. They expect flexibility, transparency, and control. They want the ability to self-serve, negotiate when needed, and clearly understand what they're paying for - and why.
Meanwhile, competition is fierce. New entrants can test and launch pricing models in days. If your infrastructure makes pricing experiments take weeks (or months), you’re not just losing time - you’re losing deals.
That’s why more companies are investing in Commerce Platform teams. Because the ROI of flexible, programmable pricing infrastructure is real:
- Faster go-to-market for new offerings
- Higher conversion across customer segments
- Improved revenue predictability and forecasting
- Reduced engineering effort tied to monetization changes
This isn’t about billing anymore. It’s about building infrastructure that lets the business move at the speed of opportunity.
Building the Commerce Platform, with Stigg
As the concept of the Commerce Platform gains traction, we believe it’s important to put a name to what so many scaling companies require. For us at Stigg, it’s more than a pattern-it’s a category.
Stigg is a monetization platform built specifically for modern software teams navigating the increasing complexity of pricing and packaging. We provide the building blocks for teams to ship faster, iterate confidently, and support a broad range of monetization models without writing custom code every time.
From usage-based metering and dynamic entitlements to in-product trials and upgrades, we help engineering, product, and go-to-market teams deliver the monetization experiences today’s customers expect-without compromising agility or maintainability.
If your team is feeling the strain of evolving pricing models, or trying to modernize hardcoded monetization logic, we’d love to connect. We’re collaborating with some of the best teams in the industry to define what the Commerce Platform should be.
Let’s shape it together.
Learn more about how Stigg can help modernize your infrastructure in a 1:1 meeting, or try Stigg for free.
