Zuora is a well-known Enterprise-scale commercial option that displaced many others as “SaaS” took off several years ago (and its associated accounting standards).
Depending on complexity, Netsuite can address some moderate scale use cases. Stripe, Chargebee, etc address more of the SMB-scale needs.
Yeah, usage rating and billing systems get wildly complex. Especially when you start considering edge cases- beyond leap years and handling time zones, things like a billable event spanning days (run a few minutes just before midnight), etc.
A Chick-fil-a near me recently remodeled and moved to a dine-in model where you don’t order at a counter- you sit down and someone comes to take your order on a tablet. I suspect we’re 5-10 years out from McD and others trying to incentivize tipping for order takers, and eliminating dine-in from some locations entirely.
McD fries just aren’t the same when delivered!
The author mentions the possibility of retail banks filling this role, and they already do the reverse—if you have a paper US Savings Bond, it can be redeemed for cash at almost any full-service bank branch. They are already deeply-involved in FedWire, the ACH Clearinghouse, and other payments rails. There’s also one in almost every neighborhood across the US.
Yeah, a lot of people who run their own email server keep it for inbound mail, and use something like Amazon SES or Sendgrid for outbound mail (so it isn’t marked as spam). Most residential ISPs block SMTP’s port 25 as well.