Autumn

What do they actually do

Autumn is a small billing layer that sits between your app and Stripe. It stores each customer’s subscription state, usage balances, and feature permissions, and exposes a simple API your app calls to start purchases, check access, and record usage. The hosted service and open‑source repo are live; teams can sign up for the dashboard or self‑host from GitHub (docs, GitHub).

In practice, teams define products, features, and pricing rules in Autumn, then call three endpoints from their app: attach (to initiate or change a purchase), check (to see if a user can run a feature or has balance), and track (to record usage). Autumn aggregates usage and maps it to Stripe for payments/invoices while your app enforces access from the check/track responses. A dashboard lets operators change pricing, manage custom plans, and see usage analytics without shipping code changes (docs). Autumn is an abstraction over Stripe, not a replacement; you still use Stripe for payments and invoicing (docs).

Who are their target customer(s)

• Early-stage AI product teams building metered features: Tracking per-call usage, balances, and feature access in-app is error‑prone; they want a single place to check if a user can run a call and to record consumption without custom billing code.
• Product-led startups that iterate pricing frequently: Every price change becomes a migration or code change that can break customers; they want to experiment and roll out pricing from a dashboard instead of shipping engineering work.
• Small engineering teams avoiding a billing database: They don’t want to build/operate usage bookkeeping, webhooks, and edge cases; they want a few API calls that outsource this complexity.
• Teams selling hybrid product+sales with bespoke contracts: Per‑account overrides and one‑off deals are hard to manage in Stripe primitives; they want a dashboard to handle custom plans without hardcoded exceptions.
• Ops/finance teams worried about variable AI costs: They lack real‑time visibility and forecasting for consumption pricing and want live usage aggregation, dashboards, and alerts to avoid surprise bills.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Run hands‑on pilots with YC founders and early AI startups that have consumption billing pain; personally help map their existing Stripe setup to Autumn and capture feedback/case studies.
• First 50: Lean on self‑serve via the open‑source repo, quickstarts, and examples; publish migration guides and blog posts, and do targeted outreach to seed/Series‑A AI dev communities with templates and a no‑surprises billing checklist.
• First 100: Add a lightweight sales motion for custom plans, use early customers as references, partner with Stripe integrators/consultancies, and ship a couple of ops‑friendly features (alerts/forecasting or contract overrides) to convert trials.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Autumn operates within the broader subscription/billing software market, which multiple reports size in the multi‑billion range today (roughly $6–9B depending on methodology) [examples: The Business Research Company and other market forecasts] (report 1, report 2).

Bottom-up calculation:

Stripe reports Billing is used by about 300,000 companies and is a meaningful product line; if Autumn converts 0.1–1% of those users at roughly $5.7K/year each (based on the $475/mo Startup plan), that implies ~$1.7–$17M ARR potential from Stripe‑based adopters alone (Stripe 2024 letter, Autumn pricing).

Assumptions:

• A meaningful subset of Stripe Billing users need usage/consumption or AI‑metered pricing in the next few years (Metronome, Maxio, Chargebee).
• Average revenue per paying customer approximates the Startup plan; enterprise/custom plans raise or lower the realized ARPU.
• Autumn initially targets product‑led or hybrid GTM teams on Stripe, not heavy enterprise migrations.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Stripe Billing: Default building block for subscriptions and metered usage (payments, invoices, Checkout, usage recording). Autumn sits on top to handle feature access checks and usage gating in app runtime (Stripe docs, Autumn docs).
• Chargebee: Hosted subscription/billing platform with metered features and operations tooling; teams still handle product gating/access checks in their app or with custom glue (usage docs).
• Recurly: Subscription manager with usage add‑ons and pricing models focused on invoicing/lifecycle automation rather than a tiny runtime access/usage API (usage docs).
• Zuora: Enterprise billing/monetization for complex contracts and high‑volume usage; powerful for finance ops but heavier than a developer‑oriented runtime access/usage layer (usage guide).
• DIY on Stripe: Many teams build their own usage tracking, gating, and dashboards on Stripe to avoid a third‑party tool, but this costs engineering time and adds edge‑case risk (see an example DIY guide here).