Cheddar, an API-driven and usage-based billing platform, is pleased to announce that Tim Falls is joining the startup’s board.

Falls has dedicated his career to engaging the developer community, with more than four years at SendGrid as Director of Developer Relations, helping the company grow from 6 to more than 250 employees during his tenure and raise more than $30M in capital. He later headed up Community Relations at Keen IO, a set of tools to help developers collect, analyze, and visualize event data.

“Tim helped create the playbook for reaching out to developers and nurturing community,” explains CEO Mike Trotzke. “His expertise will be invaluable to Cheddar as we grow.”

Known for his work leading developer relations strategies and teams, Falls has honed his understanding of how new companies can find the right segments of the community, and gain insights and feedback as they work with developers. He has recently taken this zeal and focused his work on harnessing the power of community to create positive social impact, using technology to do so.

Cheddar offers developer communities a new approach to billing that allows companies to switch fluidly between billing structures, be it a one-time, subscription, or usage-based model. This allows developers to refine their products and revenue models with the same responsiveness and fluidity that they refine features and other aspects of their software. The Bloomington, IN-based company recently received $1.25M in seed funding for its unique approach, led by Chicago-based M25 Group. Other participating firms include Little Engine Ventures, Connectic Ventures, Harbor Street Ventures, SixThirty, Cultivation Capital and Elevate Ventures. As part of the financing, Victor Gutwein from M25 and Mikel Berger from Little Engine Ventures also joined Cheddar's board.

About Cheddar

Cheddar is billing built for developers. Using a unique usage-based approach to billing, we cut the time it takes to build monetization into a product by as much as 90%. No matter if their billing model is metered, one-time, subscription, or some combination, Cheddar allows developers to focus on building awesome products, not billing for them.

Billing processes are often last-minute considerations in the software or online service development cycle. But they can determine the very business model of a company, and thus impact how their product works and how it’s monetized. 

Cheddar wants to change the way developers and others in the software business think about where the money’s coming in and how to collect it. The API-based billing platform can manage everything from one-time payments to usage-based billing, thanks to continuous updates from client companies’ data. Its intuitive dashboard and visualizations of data are designed to help software businesses see and learn quickly where the money is.

“Many online billing services are simply digital iterations of old paper systems,” muses Mike Trotzke, CEO of Cheddar. “We started by thinking about the problem from scratch, not mimicking past processes. We wanted to imagine a world with a real-time connection between software and billing. Instead of being batch or manual-entry based, you let the platforms talk to each other in real time.”

This gives software teams far greater flexibility as the business side of their company takes off. “We help development teams avoid wasting time. We didn’t want them burning hours agonizing about pricing structure and price points early on, because it’s easy to adjust the billing via Cheddar,” Trotzke explains. “We stumbled on this solution for our own startups: an abstraction layer between the billing and the software.” Instead of crafting code for a specific business plan and pricing structure, developers can remain flexible. They only need to send a few data points to Cheddar via its API, and the billing is done.

Cheddar started as a tool Trotzke and two other entrepreneurs developed for their own crop of startups, as they reimagined the role of venture capital in supporting entrepreneurs. Longtime colleagues and friends, Trotzke, Marc Guyer, and Brad Wisler decided to push the pace of development and launch speed for these fledgling companies. They eventually went on to found Sproutbox, a venture studio in Bloomington, IN, the university town turned nascent tech hub. 

First, however, they wanted to try their methods out on themselves. “We knew we wanted to build a new revenue-centric startup every three months,” he recalls. “Three months from just an idea to a viable product generating revenue.” They decided they needed to test their methods first, starting three companies that would help guide their approach to future investments.

The complexity of certain back-office functions, however, threatened to slow this sprint to revenue. “With our timeline, we couldn’t spend two of our three months building the billing part. So we built Cheddar.” 

“It is really easy to bill in the system, no matter what type of payment approach you’re looking at, be it subscription or a usage-based. To make this work, our API doesn’t consider things in dollars and cents terms. That’s not the language we use,” Trotzke notes. “In real time and throughout the billing period, Cheddar gathers data about what users are doing and notifies clients about this activity. Some of the things you track you never bill for. You’re throwing tracking data at the platform and then defining how to bill for that usage, not just invoicing digitally.”

Usage-based billing capabilities are key to many SaaS models. It’s increasingly what consumers and customers expect, to pay only for what they use and to have their personal information held securely to ensure ease of payment. “Simple subscriptions aren’t the right fit for most software ideas,” Trotzke says. “Consumption-based billing makes a lot more sense for many products and services. Instead of selling someone a bottle of water or sending them a monthly invoice for a water cooler plan, you can bill for exactly what’s pouring out of the tap.” Regardless of the model, Cheddar can handle the billing--and move easily between the different approaches as businesses change.

Cheddar
Cheddar is an API-based billing platform that can manage one-time, subscription, and usage-based payment structures via continuous updates from client companies' data. Instead of being batch or manual entry-based, platforms talk to each other in real-time. Not only does this give software teams greater flexibility as the business side of their company takes off, it significantly reduces time spent on building payment structures.