How Formance uses Hyperline to manage custom pricing
Formance runs a modular, per-client pricing model on Hyperline. Revenue teams manage billing autonomously and keep an eye on the business from quote to cash.
Formance is an open-source stack for fintechs and platforms to build and track end-to-end complex money flows. Formance’s ready-to-use ledger-based solution simplifies the development of financial back-ends, making it easier to roll out new, differentiating features, to open new markets and to scale with increasing volumes of transactions.
Challenge
On other billing platforms, custom pricing broke down at scale: the Formance team would have had to create a new product for every single new client.
Solution
Hyperline gives the team a flexible interface to customize each subscription. Revenue Ops manage the entire billing process without a line of code.
Pricing model
A modular model: a base fee plus add-ons for hosting, support, and Enterprise-grade features, combined to match the modules each client selects.
Results
Revenue teams create clients, assign custom subscriptions, and generate invoices in seconds. Formance iterates on pricing without engineering time.
Pricing a new market with no benchmarks
Formance builds an open-source stack that fintechs and platforms use to build and track end-to-end complex money flows. Founded in 2021 by Clément Salaün and Anne-Sybille Pradelles, the company sells its ledger-based solution to clients ranging from early-stage startups to mid-market companies: crypto and stock exchange, ride-hailing and delivery platforms, real estate crowdfunding platforms. Notable clients include Shares, Newton, Fundimmo, or Angkas.
Creating a pricing strategy is never easy, and Formance faced it in a totally new market, with hardly any benchmarks to compare with potential competitors. Aware that they would need to iterate a lot on their pricing strategy, the team wanted to manage this flexibility from day one.
Today, Formance operates a modular model: a base fee plus add-ons tailored to the modules each client chooses, such as hosting, support, or Enterprise-grade features. This approach gives customers high predictability on costs, critical in the current context, explains Benjamin Andoque, Operations & GTM Lead at Formance.
“Our clients wanted to know their total annual costs, prompting us to secure substantial multi-year contracts.”
Where standard billing tools fell short
A pricing model tailored to the unique needs of each client means an expanding price catalog. When the team thoroughly benchmarked billing solutions on the market, they quickly realized the limitations of existing platforms for this specific use case.
“For example, on Stripe Billing, we quickly realized that handling custom pricing would become a nightmare over time, as we would have to create a new product for each new client.”
There was a second constraint. At Formance, Revenue Ops are in charge of billing, so the platform had to be user-friendly for non-tech teams and leave the tech teams focused on the product. The team also wanted to avoid a solution that is too complex or lacks human support: the goal was to stay focused on developing the product and signing up new clients.
Autonomous billing for Revenue Ops
The benchmark led Formance to adopt Hyperline as their primary billing system, from their very first client. Setup was fast, and customizing each subscription is simple. The Revenue Ops team is now autonomous in managing billing: they create new clients, assign customizable subscriptions, and generate invoices, all in seconds and without a line of code.
Hyperline also centralizes key business metrics on the dashboard. Formance shares this data seamlessly with their accounting firm or investors, through integrated accounting tools and exports.
A pricing strategy free to evolve
The flexibility matters, because the pricing strategy is not finished evolving.
“Today, we’re on a flat fee model but we’re not ruling out deploying usage-based pricing in the future on specific module or segment. Hyperline offers us the peace-of-mind to iterate fast on our pricing strategy.”
The relationship also delivered on the point Formance cared about when ruling out complex tools: human support.
“It was important for us to have ultra-responsive support. Today, we’re highly satisfied with the relationship with the Hyperline team - whom we see as a long-term partner.”
Today, Formance signs multi-year contracts, iterates on pricing, and manages billing end to end from Hyperline, while the tech team stays focused on the product.
