Picture a phone carrier that made you choose, the day you signed up, between prepaid and a monthly plan. For good. If you ever wanted to switch, you'd give up your number and start over as a brand new customer.
Nobody would design that on purpose. Plenty of billing systems work that way anyway, because the choice made sense on the day they were built and nobody went back to it.
At Meta, one of the areas I was responsible for was payments and billing on the business side: how the company took money from the people buying its ads. You can buy ads on Facebook or Instagram from almost anywhere in the world. When I got there, a business setting up its account had to choose how it wanted to be billed. It couldn't change that later without setting up a whole new business.
Look at that from the business's side and it doesn't make sense.
The customer you signed isn't the customer you'll have
A small business picking a billing option on day one has no idea what it'll look like in two years. It doesn't know that the month it adds a zero to its ad spend, it'll need to pay differently. Maybe it grows. Maybe it changes what it sells, or its cash starts coming in on a different rhythm. The choice it made when it was tiny is still running its billing.
What we wanted was to help small businesses and individuals become bigger, more impactful businesses. Hard to do while their billing stays frozen at the size they were when they signed up.
So we built flexible billing. A business could move back and forth between prepay, postpay and variable payment. That hadn't existed before, and it gave billing a huge lift. The billing changes had a ten-figure impact on profitability.
Billing is where the whole world shows up
Here's why that's harder than it sounds. At that scale, billing is every country's version of how money works, stitched together.
Meta took money in a lot of different ways, and that money then had to be recognized inside the company. Where and how revenue got recognized depended on what was best for the company in each country. Some places you'd recognize it one way, other places differently.
Then there's how people actually pay. One of the most popular ways to pay for ads in Mexico was OXXO: you pay cash at a convenience store. Very different from how Meta took payment in the US, and very different from what I expected walking in. Every country has its own version of that. How they take payment, how they process it, tax law, payment law. Those things are real. You can't file them under edge cases.
No roadmap for everything and everyone
With that many differences, you could spend a year drawing the master plan. We didn't.
Most of the country work was prioritized by impact, need and regulation. India, for example, changes tax requirements with less leeway and less time to implement than most countries, so when something comes up there, it gets handled. We moved on whatever would have the most impact, knowing that solving a problem in one country might or might not solve it anywhere else. We did not try to write the roadmap for everything and everyone.
Flexible billing ran the other way around. We thought it was wrong for businesses everywhere, so we built the capability first, then chose which countries to launch in first, to show the most impact or to learn the most about what it could do. Changes to how money moved in Asia Pacific had a large impact too. Different problem, same habit: start where it matters most.
Billions, not millions
Being that specific about impact means a lot of good work never gets done.
My first month, in the Seattle office, I heard about an opportunity and said something like, "We could do this, and it would make millions of dollars for the company." A colleague put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Brandon, we work in billions here, not millions."
It's funny now. It's also the clearest lesson in opportunity cost I've had. Sometimes you skip something that would help, because it takes focus from something that would help a lot more. You can't do everything. Smaller work got dropped for bigger work, over and over.
In a smaller company the numbers shrink. The trade stays exactly the same.
Where the metaphor breaks
A phone carrier letting you switch plans is mostly flipping a setting. At a global platform, moving a business from prepay to postpay touches credit, revenue recognition, and the tax and payment law of whatever country that business sits in. To the customer the switch looks like a toggle. Behind it sits a different product in every market.
And a carrier usually wants you to switch, since switching often means upgrading. Inside a company, a rigid billing setup tends to survive because noticing what it costs is nobody's job. The businesses that outgrow it rarely complain. They spend less than they would have, or they leave.
Try this
- List every choice a customer makes at signup: plan, billing method, currency, contract term, account structure.
- For each one, ask what it takes to change it later. Anything that requires starting over puts a cap on how far that customer can grow with you.
- Find five customers who are much bigger now than when they signed. Look at what they're still stuck with from day one.
- If something is wrong for everyone, build the fix once, then pick where to launch it by where you'll learn the most.
- Before you chase the next opportunity, ask what it pulls focus from. Write down what you're choosing not to do.
Where do you land?
