[sokoloff]

The reason customers are struggling with MTU-based billing is because that’s “your world/your problem” language.

Bill them by terms and items in “their world/their problem” language. Customer profiles, customer records, data records, or whatever makes sense to them.

When they ask you “what’s an MTU?!” take the words you use to explain it and consider billing on that instead. They’re not using you to store/produce MTUs; they’re using you to better connect with their customers.

You also don’t need to go full utility pricing (where if they do nothing, they pay nothing). Tiered approaches to billing give you and them more certainty and removes a bit of friction from the initial interaction. “Up to 25K user profiles and 1000 email events (additional emails $10 per 1000)” might be more customer-friendly language.

You can have customers that you lose money on if they have exactly the perfectly wrong shape of data for a while. Just make it easy and make sure you have a path to being profitable on the aggregate.