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The Rise of Consumption Billing
For most finance teams, planning is built on pillars of predictability, control, and visibility. But in today’s tech landscape, those pillars are crumbling.
The root cause is a widespread pricing model that makes forecasting near enough impossible: consumption-based billing.
In theory, pay for what you use or transactional billing sounds like a fair trade. But in practice, it’s a finance team’s nightmare.
What can look like a manageable expense in Q1 can balloon into a multi-million liability in Q2. That kind of variability is incompatible with the budgeting and forecasting methods CFOs and finance teams rely on.
You can’t model chaos. You can only brace for impact. And meanwhile the business suffers from a taxi meter effect on innovation.
No Pricing Standardisation
One of the key hurdles that finance and procurement teams face when forecasting costs and comparing suppliers is that there no pricing standardisation. Each technology provider invents their own metric definitions, bundles, and line items.
Location APIs, the market in which we operate in at TravelTime, is arguably one of the worst culprits.
Even across the big players like Google, HERE, Mapbox, and TomTom, there is little consistency in how they price API usage once you dive into it. We know that it’s a usage-based model but the market lacks transparency on how much API usage really costs. This is true across the whole B2B technology world: API, Cloud, SaaS, and beyond.
Why Forecasting Breaks Under Usage-Based Pricing
The fundamental problem is that the use of technology isn’t linear and surges from unanticipated workloads are common. Growth in customer demand, a new product launch, or a one-off marketing campaign can all trigger a spike in technology usage.
We see it all the time with our customers at TravelTime whose API usage will spike at seemingly random times.
In a usage-based pricing model, this spike in API calls and infrastructure load translates into an unpredictable cost event.
What’s particularly frustrating for users operating in a transactional model is when usage spikes aren't correlated to direct revenue growth — perhaps you’re testing ideas or trialling a new product. That means your costs rise independently of your income. You're scaling spend without scaling ROI aka a CFO’s nightmare.
With TravelTime’s unlimited usage model, there is no penalty for jumps in technology usage and no additional cost to our customers’ success.
Carl Law, Executive Director of Technology at Clarity, shares his experience in our customer story: “If we’d tried to implement the new features using the Google API we were looking at potentially spending 6 figures annually with them - our fixed price TravelTime licence is a fraction of that.”
Forecast Complexity Becomes a Cost Centre
The complexity of usage-based billing and rising pressure on CFOs to meet tight budgets has led to the steady emergence of dedicated teams to simply manage costs. That’s why FinOps exists.
It's not just about saving money — it's about surviving the billing complexity and unpredictability that has become synonymous with Cloud, API, and SaaS technology usage.
But these cost control functions add overhead themselves. Every person or process you add to understand spend is another cost centre, eating into margin and introducing friction into financial planning.
Slowly but surely, your reliance on service and technology providers that charge by usage means that finance teams aren’t planning for growth, they’re planning for damage control.
Predictability Is Power
At TravelTime, we’ve taken a fundamentally different approach. We don’t meter usage. We don’t charge per API call. And we don’t pass our infrastructure complexity onto our customers.
Instead, we offer fixed, unlimited usage pricing. It’s one fixed cost that will not spike with your API usage.
Now, you may be thinking: “How can you charge in this way?”
Essentially, we can offer unlimited usage because our infrastructure can handle it. We built our infrastructure to deliver high-performance, and support accuracy at huge scales. We manage our own capacity, control our costs, and ensure our platform scales without ever passing volatility onto our customers.
This gives finance leaders the clarity and confidence they need to plan, budget, and grow without fear of surprise bills.
When a customer signs up with TravelTime, they’re not just buying location tech — they’re buying cost certainty.
- Fixed monthly costs mean no budget shock
- Unlimited usage means teams can innovate freely
- No cloud dependence means no third-party surprises
- It’s a model built for clarity, not complexity
A Final Word from CFO to CFO
Forecasting isn’t broken because your models are bad. It’s broken because the tools you rely on are priced in ways that resist predictability.
If your tech partners make it harder to budget, harder to innovate, and harder to grow, it’s time to rethink those relationships.
At TravelTime, we’re proud to offer an alternative: one that aligns with your strategic goals and supports long-term success. No usage traps. Just technology and a pricing model you can trust.
Chat to us about how we can support your move to TravelTime, an unlimited usage fixed cost location API provider.
