How Gladia uses Hyperline to handle pay-as-you-go billing easily

A three-tier model set before launch

Gladia builds an audio intelligence API: a tool powered by generative AI that turns any audio into text in near real time, with speaker diarization and word-level timestamps. Call center companies, virtual meeting services, emergency services, and video publishers all run on it. As Constant Dacbert, Head of Sales, likes to say, as long as a company uses audio, it can use Gladia.

The pricing model has three tiers. A Free plan offers up to 10 hours of transcription at no charge. A Pro plan bills pay-as-you-go: companies monitor their usage and subscription, monthly or annual, and pay for the exact volume of audio transcribed at the end of the month. An Enterprise plan covers large volumes, negotiated directly with the sales team and with special discounts. Gladia has kept this structure since day one, with 2024 planned as the first iteration on it.

Billing scars from previous companies

Even before officially launching the product, the team wanted a robust billing system. Jean-Louis Queguiner, Gladia’s founder, came from OVH Cloud; Constant came from Sqreen, acquired by Datadog. Both understood the challenges of billing for a complex hybrid pricing model, and Constant had struggled with subscription management tools at his previous company.

“Recurly was so painful, mainly due to a very bad backend connection. That was a big no-go to start again with this solution.”

The target was clear: a unique billing tool able to onboard future customers autonomously on the free and pay-as-you-go plans, and to manage Enterprise subscriptions in the same place.

“Very quickly, we understood that custom sales agreements would become a significant part of our business as we’re growing. Today, about 15-20% of our paid customers have custom subscriptions.”

An evaluation measured in engineering time

Gladia’s team looked for an end-to-end billing solution that was usage-based friendly and addressed every use case: credits, subscription management, payment collection, and custom sales agreements. The market offered many providers, but none matched their needs perfectly. Some were too specialized and focused on metering. Most of the others, including Stripe Billing, were ruled out for the same reason: they demanded too much engineering time to customize.

“A few weeks before our launch, we wanted the tech team to be 100% focused on the product rather than building our billing system or allocating dev time to an existing solution to ensure our complex use case works.”

Hyperline emerged as the all-in-one solution that met all their expectations and required the least development time, both during implementation and for subscription maintenance.

Live in June 2023, billing included

When Gladia launched their product in June 2023, they chose Hyperline as their exclusive billing platform. The business and tech teams received support throughout the implementation, with a dedicated account manager ready to address every question.

“The Hyperline team was not only present but exceptionally responsive during our integration. It quickly reassured us, and the overall experience was really smooth.”

Today, Hyperline is part of Constant’s daily routine. The dashboard gives a comprehensive view of active subscriptions, outstanding payments, pending payments, and other metrics, and exports reliable data to share with third parties. The platform is intuitive enough for the sales team to work with total autonomy: creating new clients, activating subscriptions, and managing invoices without engineering help. Slack alerts announce each new self-serve subscription, so the entire team keeps an eye on new customers.

Billing never became a distraction. Gladia’s engineers stayed focused on the product, and the billing foundation was ready before the first customer signed up.