Usage-based pricing solved one problem and created another. Revenue now scales with the product, which is exactly what investors want to see. But the CFO still has to forecast a number. And "we'll know at end of month" is not a forecast.
The classic fix is the commit. The customer agrees to a minimum spend for a term — a quarter, a year, a multi-year deal — and in return gets a rate, a volume, or simply the comfort of a predictable line item. Sales closes a real number. Finance books a real number. Consumption does what consumption does.
For a deeper side-by-side with prepaid credit models, see our companion piece on credit vs. commit burndown. This article zooms in on the commit side specifically: how it works under the hood, what goes wrong without the right plumbing, and what Plock actually tracks for you.
What a commit actually is
A commit is a contractual floor on billings across a defined period. Usage is metered as normal. At the end of the term (or on a configurable cadence) you compare real consumption against the commitment and invoice whichever is higher.
In Plock, this lives on the subscription itself. The minimum commitment on a subscription is the number your CRO and the customer shook hands on. When invoices are generated, Plock adds a minimum-commitment line if usage fell short of the floor — alongside the normal usage and revenue lines. If usage exceeded the floor, the commit simply burns down to zero and the customer pays for what they used.
That one switch, sitting inside the Subscription editor under "Apply minimum commitment", is doing a surprising amount of work:
- It gives Finance a floor for the term, which feeds directly into forecast and cash-collection projections.
- It gives Sales a number to sell against, rather than a speculative run-rate.
- It lets the customer commit without feeling like they capped their own growth.
A good commit is a floor, not a ceiling. The moment it feels like a cap, you have either priced it wrong or structured it wrong.
Burndown is not a report, it's a continuous signal
"Burndown" describes how the commit is consumed over the term. On day one, the customer owes the full minimum. By the last day of the term, actual usage has either met it, exceeded it, or fallen short. The question is when you find out.
Most billing stacks find out on the day the invoice runs. That is too late. By the time you see a customer tracking 40% below their commit at month nine, your CSM has already missed two quarters of expansion conversations, and Finance is about to recognise a true-up they didn't forecast.
Plock takes a different route. Usage is streamed from the customer's own product database — continuously, not at end-of-month — through the same pipeline that powers real-time revenue. That means the burndown position is a live number. Committed fees, expected committed fees, and a forward projection that looks past the contract end date are all visible on subscription and client dashboards, and surface in the revenue reports your RevOps team already looks at every morning.
No cron job. No month-end reconciliation sprint. The burndown moves with usage.
Where commits usually break
The mechanics are simple. The operational failure modes are not.
- The commit lives in the CRM, the usage lives in the product, and nobody tells the invoice. Spreadsheets bridge the gap. Spreadsheets drift.
- Multi-currency contracts. The commit was signed in EUR, the invoice runs in USD, and the FX rate moved six percent between signing and true-up. Someone has to decide which rate applies, and prove it.
- Mid-term changes. A customer upgrades a tier in month five. Does the commit rebase? Pro-rate? Carry forward? If the answer lives in a PDF, you have a problem.
- Annual commits billed monthly. The customer pays 1/12 each month, but the burndown is annual. The invoice logic needs to know both.
- Renewals and end-dates. An open-ended subscription treats "expected" differently from one with a hard end date. If your forecast doesn't distinguish, your cash collection report lies to you.
Because Plock computes commit-related fees directly from the subscription terms — including rebate handling, scheduled future changes, and currency conversion at invoice time — the awkward edges are handled in the system rather than inside a quarterly scramble.
What this looks like for Finance
The headline: commit burndown turns usage-based revenue into something you can actually put in a board deck.
In the Plock reports view, committed fees sit as a separate series from usage fees and one-time fees. That split is the whole point. Committed fees are the floor you can defend in a forecast. Usage fees above the floor are the upside you shouldn't smooth away. One-off fees are what they are. Three lines, three different confidence levels, one chart.
On the ARR and MRR side, committed MRR and ARR give you a contracted baseline that doesn't flicker with monthly consumption noise. You can report a committed ARR number with a straight face, and a total ARR number that captures reality. Both are true. They're just answering different questions.
For cash collection, one figure projects what's still owed under current commitments. If you want the optimistic cut that assumes customers will renew past their contractual end date, there's a parallel view that looks past the end date. The choice of which one to trust is a policy decision — Plock just hands you both.
What this looks like for Sales and CS
Commits only work if the people closest to the customer know the position. A CRO walking into a QBR without knowing the customer is 70% through their annual commit in month four is flying blind — that is either the easiest upsell of the year or a painful overage conversation, depending on how you set it up. Either way, you want to know before the meeting.
Plock pushes the signals that matter into the tools the revenue team already lives in. Burndown progress, projected overages, and drop-offs against expected usage feed the same signal system that powers churn and upsell detection, and the HubSpot integration keeps the CRM view in sync so deal records reflect what the product is actually seeing.
The commit becomes a conversation, not an invoice surprise.
The short version
A commit is a promise from the customer about the floor. Burndown is how you track whether that promise is being kept — not at quarter-end, but live. Do it on top of real-time usage data and three things happen at once: Finance gets a defendable forecast, Sales gets an expansion radar, and the customer stops getting invoiced surprises.
Usage-based pricing doesn't have to mean unpredictable revenue. It means the predictability has to be engineered in, at the layer between the product and the invoice. That's the layer Plock was built for — have a look at how we think about charging, or get in touch if you want to see a commit burndown running against your own data.