How Formance uses Hyperline to manage custom pricing

A conversation with Benjamin Andoque, Operations & GTM Lead from Formance

About Formance

Founded in 2021 by Clément Salaün and Anne-Sybille Pradelles, 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.

Addressing clients from early-stage startups to mid-market companies, Formance enables engineering and product teams to build highly customizable payment logic without the heavy lifting. The company supports various business types, from crypto and stock exchange, ride-hailing and delivery platforms to real estate crowdfunding platforms—all characterized by a strong engineering DNA. Notable clients include Shares, Newton, Fundimmo, or Angkas.

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Building your pricing model in a new market

Creating a pricing strategy is never a walk in the park—especially when you're navigating a totally new market with hardly any benchmarks to compare with potential competitors. That was the situation during Formance's early days of hitting the market.

Aware that they would need to iterate a lot on their pricing strategy, Formance wanted to be able to manage this flexibility from day one.

Today, they operate on a very modular approach, by offering a customizable pricing model, allowing clients to select and combine various modules based on their needs. The pricing structure includes a base fee plus additional add-ons, tailored to the specific modules chosen by the client - hosting, support, Enterprise-grade features. This approach allow Formance to provide high predictability to its customers - critical in the current context. "Our clients wanted to know their total annual costs, prompting us to secure substantial multi-year contracts” shares Benjamin Andoque, Operations & GTM Lead from Formance

“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” - Benjamin Andoque

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Billing your first client using Hyperline

After thoroughly benchmarking various billing solutions in the market, the Formance team quickly realized the limitations of existing platforms for their specific use case, leading them to adopt Hyperline as their primary billing system. Here are 4 of the reasons why they love using Hyperline since day 1:

Effortlessly handling tailor-made pricing

With its highly flexible pricing model tailored to the unique needs of each client, Formance’s team should now handle an expanding price catalog. While most market solutions fall short for this use case, Benjamin opted for Hyperline because customizing each subscription is a breeze.

"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", Benjamin shared.

Billing made for Revenue Ops

At Formance, Revenue Ops are the ones in charge on billing. So, they needed a billing platform that is user-friendly for non-tech teams, allowing the tech teams to focus on the product. The Revenue Ops teams are now autonomous in managing billing—creating new clients, assigning customizable subscriptions, and generating invoices—all in seconds, without a line of code.

Key metrics to keep an eye on business

Formance leverages Hyperline to centralize key business metrics on the dashboard, allowing seamless sharing of this data with their accounting firm or investors through integrated accounting tools and exports.

Building a long-term partnership

Right from the start, Formance aimed to avoid wasting time with a solution that's too complex and lacks human support. Their goal was to stay focused on developing their product and signing up new clients.

"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", added Benjamin.

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