How Personal.ai uses Amberflo to enable usage-based billing for its product-led motion

Personal.ai allows users to create their own personal large language models that are trained on their unique memories, knowledge and experience in order to unlock their full creative potential. Users can seamlessly speak, write, upload or sync all their insights, ideas, inspirations and experiences to their private memory stacks. Trained on these unique memories, their AI can help them inspire and provide ideas, as well as connect and converse with others with their AI in the loop.

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The Situation

Personal.ai selected Amberflo to partner with to build its metering and billing infrastructure. The decoupled yet integrated design of the Metering and Billing Clouds was a key factor in selecting Amberflo, as the infrastructure enabled Personal.ai’s present-day monetization efforts from end to end, while also providing a true system of record for usage and consumption to inform future pricing and product development decisions. Additionally, the ability to define a custom currency, track usage and credits balance in real-time, calculate cost-basis, and easily enable prepaid credits via a draw-down mechanism were must-haves for Personal.ai’s pricing and billing strategy.

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The Solution

Amberflo partnered with Personal.ai to deliver the metering and billing infrastructure enabling Personal.ai’s usage-based monetization model to production in record time for Personal.ai’s public launch. The following are a few key capabilities that were required:

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• API metering to track usage
  Personal.ai interfaces with several internal and third-party API-based applications and systems, and needed a standard metering and billing interface that can easily and accurately (deduping records, unique counts, and more..) meter API calls to track product usage and enable a flexible, usage-based pricing model built on top.
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• ‍Free Tier and automatic conversion
  Personal.ai needed to implement a value-based, product-led engagement strategy, built around a generous free tier that allows users to experience the full capability of the application and realize value. This seamless user journey is built to convert customers to paid plans only after they have seen firsthand value from the platform.
  Users can continue on forever with the free tier if they would like, but by signing up for the higher tiers, users benefit from continuous training of their AI models, and they are able to chat with their AI and share access with others. Users on the highest tier are able to eventually monetize their AI based on other users’ interactions with it.
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• Payments Integration and Flexible Billing
  As users upgrade from free tier to paid, based on usage and consumption, Personal.ai captures users payment information at the point of conversion, when invoicing and billing is automatically turned on. From this moment, real-time invoices are available to all users on-demand.
  After users up-level to the paid tier, they are charged at the start of each billing period and allocated a certain amount of usage (model training time, model interactions, etc.). Usage is metered and once the quotas for the plan are reached, customers have the ability to purchase additional add-on packages such as more model training time.
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• Real-time dashboards showing usage, cost, and credits balance
  Real-time dashboards are visible for both internal teams and users to create real-time visibility into usage, credits consumption, and revenue generated. Users can see their individual usage, credits history, and past invoices at any time in the billing period to ensure the experience is fully transparent. Internal teams have complete visibility into product usage and revenue generated across the entire customer base with the ability to drill-down into specific customers or segments as needed.

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The Results

Partnering with Amberflo led to a number of key benefits and improvements for Personal.ai as it operationalized a metering and billing pipeline to support its usage-based motion and enable rapid product adoption post-launch.

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• Rapid time-to-market
  By partnering with Amberflo and implementing the Metering and Billing Clouds as a fully-managed service, Personal.ai saved hundreds of engineering hours and weeks of development effort that would have been spent building the necessary infrastructure for metering and billing internally. The Amberflo solution was integrated with Personal.ai’s stack seamlessly (using Amberflo SDKs), enabling its usage-based monetization model in time for the public launch of its product.
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• Increased Adoption and Growth
  By leveraging Amberflo’s Cloud Metering and Pricing Billing Platform, Personal.ai’s internal teams across all key functions (product, engineering, sales, support, and finance) would anchor on utility and create value in the system -- as derived from user engagement. Amberflo’s platform provides key intelligence about user groups and behavior for Personal.ai helping them to discover and prioritize new product features and product roadmap leading to continuously driving innovation and improving customer engagement and satisfaction.
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• Superior User Experience
  By leveraging Amberflo’s API-first and developer friendly Metering Cloud and Billing Cloud, Personal.ai was able to build exactly and precisely the product experience it envisioned with usage, credits, rewards, and customer-facing dashboards as integrated parts of the product. The experience presents usage and costs in a completely immersive, informative, and non-disruptive way to users.
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• Significant Cost Savings
  Beyond avoiding the internal build of a metering pipeline and billing infrastructure, by leveraging Amberflo as a fully-managed service, Personal.ai was able to focus its engineering and product resources (its most valuable assets) on developing core products and services. Personal.ai estimates that it saved months of core engineering and product development time.

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To experience and try Personal.ai live in production, visit: www.personal.ai

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