As more companies adopt usage-based billing models, managing event ingestion becomes increasingly important. You need a powerful event ingestion platform that is designed to simplify and streamline the entire process, enabling you to focus on growing your business while it handles the complexities of usage-based billing.
Togai's event ingestion platform is built to simplify this process, allowing businesses to focus on growth while handling the complexities of usage-based billing. Togai is engineered to support high-throughput environments, accommodating a continuous stream of 10,000 events per second. Togai can process over a billion events daily, making it ideal for businesses with extensive data needs.
Let’s see what are the common features you need to look for when you hear about event processing,
Batch Processing - CSV Imports:
Whenever you choose an event ingestion engine, it should be engineered to handle a high throughput environment that is capable of processing a continuous stream of events at scale. Why so? With Togai you can translate billions of events per day with a minimum of 10,000 events per second. There are two ways you can get your event data - push data to Togai or connect Togai to your database to pull the event metrics.
- Push: You can either do a CSV import into Togai’s platform or send data to Togai using APIs.
- Pull: Togai can pull data from your database with SQL queries. With periodic scans, we can scan the billing line items you’ve defined to ingest your event data.
With the event data, Togai will automatically process the data, and apply the relevant pricing calculations and other parameters you’ve set, to generate the invoice.
Enrichments:
Enrichment feature is a powerful tool for product managers who need to apply complex pricing logic to their usage events. It allows them to define custom rules that interpret and categorize event data based on specific criteria, enabling more granular and accurate billing.
Product managers often face the challenge of pricing based on interpreted values from event payloads. For example, a payment processor may want to charge their customers based on transaction amount bands.
Let’s look at an example we’re familiar with - sending messages through our network provider!
Let’s say a company has ensured that 1 sms = 160 characters. In this case, many companies store the characters and don’t have logics to compute the number of sms sent. In their systems, the same data will get recorded as characters, but when they send the input data as characters, using Togai’s enrichment, you can convert it into a billable metric - say number of sms.
1 Sms = 160 characters. If it’s 180 characters - if we divide by 180/160 it becomes 1.12, which will be rounded off and considered as two messages.
These rules can be easily configured within Togai's platform, without requiring any complex coding or development efforts.
Once the rules are set up, Togai automatically applies them to incoming usage events, enriching the data with the appropriate category. Moreover, the enrichment feature is not limited to transaction amounts. You can define custom rules based on any relevant event data, such as user location, device type, or billing plan. This versatility enables companies to create highly personalized and adaptive pricing models that cater to the unique needs and preferences of their customers.
Deduplication:
Events are crucial for understanding user behavior and calculating usage-based billing. However, due to an unexpected issue with the event tracking system, only partial events are sent to the billing platform.
This could happen for various reasons, such as network disruptions, server outages, or code bugs. As a result, the usage data is incomplete, which can lead to inaccurate billing and skewed analytics.
Everytime the product manager needs to ask the developer to check for the missed data, sift through it and send it again, but this causes a lot of backlog and dependency. Your engineering team needs to stretch their bandwidth to accommodate these requests. But with Togai, you can simply resend the entire data.
Whatever isn’t there automatically gets filled, making sure you dont waste your time on repetitive tasks. This means you can focus on building your product, while we handle the data integrity.
Configurable Idempotency:
A configurable idempotency feature is a powerful tool that ensures the accuracy and reliability of usage data, even in the face of network disruptions, system failures, or unintentional event duplications. It provides developers and product managers with the flexibility to define custom event identifiers that uniquely represent each usage event, guaranteeing that events are processed exactly once.
Togai's configurable idempotency is beneficial for product managers. For instance, a video streaming service can define a unique event identifier using a combination of timestamp, accountID, and video ID. This ensures that each video view event is processed exactly once, even if the same event is accidentally sent multiple times due to network issues or retries. Togai's idempotency feature provides accurate and reliable usage data.
The benefits of configurable idempotency extend beyond handling network issues. It also protects against other common scenarios that can lead to duplicate events, such as:
- Retry mechanisms: If the video streaming service has a retry mechanism in place to handle temporary failures, it may result in the same event being sent multiple times. Configurable idempotency ensures that these retried events are not double-counted.
- User actions: In some cases, users may accidentally perform the same action multiple times, such as rapidly clicking a button. Configurable idempotency prevents these duplicate user actions from being recorded as separate events.
- System failures: In the event of a system failure or crash, the system may need to rebuild its event data from a backup or replay events from a message queue. Configurable idempotency guarantees that replayed events do not lead to duplicate recordings.
Event Level Revenue:
Tracking revenue at a granular level is crucial for handling disputes and reconciliation. Tracking revenue at the granular level of each event is crucial for several reasons and will show you how much is each event contributing towards your revenue. Event level revenue helps with,
- Reconciliation: Event-level revenue tracking enables the logistics company to reconcile its financial records with the actual services provided. They can compare the revenue generated from each event with the corresponding costs incurred, ensuring that their financial statements are accurate and complete.
- Monitor transaction success rates: By tracking revenue for each transaction event, the fintech company can quickly identify and investigate any failed or declined transactions, ensuring a smooth customer experience and minimizing revenue leakage.
- Detect fraudulent activities: Event-level revenue tracking can help the fintech company detect and prevent fraudulent transactions. By analyzing revenue patterns at the transaction level, they can identify suspicious activities and take proactive measures to mitigate risks.
External Data Sources:
A billing platform’s ability to integrate with existing event tracking systems is a significant advantage for companies that have already invested in data collection infrastructure. By leveraging external data sources, companies can seamlessly incorporate their existing event data into their billing and revenue management processes.
Look at Togai’s supported integrations here >>. Don’t see your provider on the list? Reach out to us, we also help with custom integrations.
Conclusion
Usage-based billing has emerged as a powerful strategy for companies to align their revenue with the value they provide to customers. However, implementing and managing a usage-based billing model comes with its own set of challenges, particularly in terms of event ingestion and data processing.
Businesses need a comprehensive and flexible event ingestion platform that can handle the complexities of usage-based billing. Such a platform should offer a range of features designed to streamline the entire process, from data import to revenue computation.
