Octave runs a generative GTM platform. Companies like Clay plug into Octave's enrichment layer, pre-purchase credits in bulk, and burn through them at unpredictable volumes. When a customer is running hot, Octave needs to track every credit in real time, bill accurately, and make sure nobody blows past their limits without getting charged.

That kind of billing doesn't come off the shelf.

"We had reached a point where metering our agents and APIs, plus managing subscriptions and entitlements across thousands of accounts and millions of events was becoming an increasingly large part of our infrastructure and eng team's burden to manage," says Zach Vidibor, Octave's co-founder and CEO.

They tried building it themselves first

Octave's CEO started talking to Measure (then Maple) two years before signing. He liked the rev ops workflow — managing contracts and subscriptions in one place instead of stitching together Stripe plus custom code plus manual updates.

But he needed engineering to sign off. And engineering had just been burned.

A third-party integration vendor Octave depended on had shut down without warning, forcing their eng team to rebuild those connections from scratch. The last thing they wanted was another dependency on an early-stage company. So they said no, and built on Stripe.

What Stripe couldn't do

Stripe handled payments. It didn't handle what Octave actually needed: real-time credit tracking across customers who purchase in bulk and consume at wildly different rates. Usage-based billing at their scale meant building and maintaining custom infrastructure on top of Stripe — metering, rating, threshold alerts, invoicing logic — all of it owned by engineers who should have been working on the core product.

The CTO hit a wall. Managing usage-based billing on Stripe had become its own engineering project, competing directly with product work that actually mattered.

As Zach put it: "We want to spend every possible minute of our time building features and capabilities that our customers come uniquely to us for. We want to focus on the stuff that makes our beer taste better, as they say."

Meanwhile, Zach had kept his Measure account active. He wasn't paying for it — just tracking MRR through the dashboard because the metrics were more accurate than anything else he'd seen. A free tool was quietly doing better revenue reporting than his paid stack.

Two years later, the CTO came back

The conversation reopened from the engineering side this time. Octave's CTO had spent two years managing the billing infrastructure burden and decided it wasn't worth carrying anymore.

The migration was real work — a couple of months of focused engineering effort to move the existing billing infrastructure over. Credit tracking, usage-based billing logic, the event pipeline handling millions of events across thousands of accounts. The Measure team was in the Slack channel throughout, shipping feature requests the next day when Octave's engineers hit edge cases.

When it came time to cut over, both teams were on a call at 2am, migrating thousands of user accounts and subscriptions during the lowest-traffic window. As Zach described it: "When the rubber really meets the road and it's time to ship it all to production and migrate thousands of user accounts and subscriptions at 2am in the morning when traffic is lowest, you're all staying up late together."

What changed

Octave was spending roughly $17,000 a year on Stripe before the switch. Their Measure contract came in at $20,000 — more on paper, but that number replaced an entire billing infrastructure layer they'd been building and maintaining with their own engineers.

The cost wasn't the point. The point was that Octave's engineers stopped being billing engineers.

Credits tracking, real-time usage metering, contract management, revenue reporting — it all runs through Measure now. The integration is deep, which is exactly why it works. Once an engineering team has done this migration, they never want to touch billing infrastructure again. When Octave needs a new capability, they bring it to Measure instead of building it.

"I can't say enough good things about not just the tech they've built, but the team that Ruchi and Ashwin have assembled," Zach wrote. "They have been true partners in every sense of the word."

The deal took two years to close. In that time, Octave went from a $200/month prospect to a $20,000/year customer — because by the time they were ready, the problem was big enough to match the solution.

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