Metronome accelerated development of its new Salesforce integration by 4 months with Census Embedded
Metronome, a billing platform designed for software companies, uses Census Embedded to provide a robust, flexible Salesforce integration for its customers. Census Embedded accelerated the integration's time-to-market by 4 months and saved 2 full-time employees.
Metronome is a usage-based billing platform designed for software companies, providing infrastructure to help businesses launch, iterate, and scale their billing models. Companies like OpenAI, Databricks, and NVIDIA use Metronome to manage usage-based pricing models, track real-time usage and billing data, and bill customers effectively.
Results
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Providing new Salesforce fields and objects in minutes — Census Embedded makes it easy to sync data to new Salesforce objects, without days of development work.
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Capabilities in weeks, not months — Census Embedded helped Metronome rebuild its Salesforce integration in 3 weeks, not 5 months.
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Removing single points of failure – Census Embedded saves the Metronome engineering team from maintaining in-house Salesforce expertise.
"We want to be a source of truth for pricing and billing data. But in order to be a source of truth, we need to distribute that data to relevant services. Exporting to Salesforce is a non-negotiable for our customers, and Census Embedded helps us do that seamlessly."
The Challenges
1. An early Salesforce integration was brittle and difficult to debug.
Metronome is critical infrastructure for revenue teams, hosting data about available pricing plans as well as billable product usage. The sales teams of Metronome’s customers need this data to provide reliable quotes to prospects. If you know any sales teams, you know this already: they need this data in Salesforce.
However, Metronome faced challenges with its existing Salesforce integration built in-house. "While the initial Salesforce integration was a great MVP, our customers were increasingly relying on Metronome's data to run their business. We needed something more robust," states Ryan M, Engineering Manager at Metronome.
An external consultant built the original integration, a service that pulled data from Metronome’s public API, and then pushed that data into Salesforce. This integration would fail at scale, lacked crucial monitoring and alerting, and couldn’t keep track of state to retry failed records in the future.
"Our customers have lots of data. If anybody had more than 10,000 of any record, our original in-house integration would break… and then monitoring and alerting were very difficult. It was very hard to debug without me basically getting access to a customer’s Salesforce instance and looking through logs myself."
2. Metronome needed to rebuild the Salesforce integration, but faced resource constraints
When Metronome decided to refactor their public API, they realized they would have to revisit their Salesforce integration. They knew that refactoring the existing integration would take 2 full-time software engineers away from other projects for nearly half a year.
Even with this work, Ryan knew he wouldn't be solving an even more critical problem – the dependency on Ryan’s Salesforce expertise.
“Building a new Salesforce integration would take a minimum of 1, if not 2, full-time hires, and roughly 4 to 5 months of pure engineering time. After all that, I’d still be the only subject matter expert who knows Salesforce long-term. Having a full-time person dedicated to just Salesforce really didn't make a lot of sense.”
The Solution
Metronome uses Census Embedded to export S3 Files into customer Salesforce Accounts
With Census Embedded, Metronome frees up valuable engineering time to invest in their core billing platform. They no longer waste time over Salesforce quirks and API plumbing.
When Metronome customers want to export data to Salesforce, they can do so directly from their Metronome administrative portal. When the customer clicks to authenticate their Salesforce account, they are taken to a secure OAuth experience provided by Census Embedded.
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Once Salesforce is connected, Metronome uses Census Embedded’s APIs to export data from their own S3 bucket into their customer’s Salesforce account. Census’s AWS Athena source queries Metronome’s S3 files, and then Census exports this data to Salesforce with any new or changed records. The Census Embedded web application provides Ryan and his team with detailed logging, observability, and alerting so that they can support their customers at scale.
"During my testing process, I synced over one record type into Salesforce that had 500,000 records. It took nine minutes and I didn't have to do anything besides just write a query and hit the sync button."
Result #1:
Expanded Salesforce fields and objects offered to customers
Every Salesforce account is different, and every sales team needs slightly different data. As a result, Ryan’s team faced an endless stream of requests to supply Metronome data to new Salesforce fields and objects.
With Census Embedded, Ryan and his team no longer spend days of valuable development time coding against the Salesforce API.
“Adding new entities and fields has gone from days to minutes,” says Ryan. Via the Census Embedded administrative portal, he can adjust customer syncs to make this data available to customers in minutes, and then adjust the embedded integration when he's ready.
Result #2:
Advanced time-to-market by 4 months and saved 2 FTEs
Instead of five months and two full-time engineers to re-develop Metronome’s Salesforce integration, Metronome’s customers were using Census Embedded within three weeks.
In addition, anyone on the Metronome engineering team is now able to maintain the Salesforce integration, not just Ryan.
"While it saves on time, Census Embedded also democratizes our Salesforce integration to everyone at the company versus just me. I’m no longer a hard dependency."
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