The one to blame when something goes wrong – Arnon’s blog

  • 🦑 The 14 pains of building your own billing system

    Trying to cobble together your own billing system is like wrestling an octopus that’s armed with tax codes and invoices instead of tentacles. It’s a beast of complexity that can tangle up everything from customer support to compliance. I have 14 points on why it’s hard.

  • Book Arnon for 30 minutes

    If: Then I have an offer for you! For the next couple of months I’m offering a free 30-minute session where I will help you analyse your product’s value metrics, and guide you to come up with a monetization strategy that works for you and your customers. In the session I can help you: If…

  • You’re pricing your SaaS wrong but that’s probably OK

    You’re pricing your SaaS wrong but that’s probably OK

    Previously, I wrote about how important it is to Design your pricing and tools so you can adapt them later – now I want to give a little bit more material on that… I’m going to assume that you’re some sort of SaaS founder, or perhaps even a product manager for pricing, growth, or monetisation.…

  • Design your pricing and tools so you can adapt them later

    Design your pricing and tools so you can adapt them later

    In this blog post I’ll talk about three pricing architecture concepts that I think are really important in modern billing – designing pricing and packaging to be adaptable. I’ll build upon the experience our billing infrastructure team had at Pleo, which has allowed us to expand to new geographies, currencies, and adapt pricing very rapidly.…

  • How we built a Cashback system with Stripe

    How we built a Cashback system with Stripe

    Recently, at Pleo, we built a cashback system that uses our internal payments infrastructure, as well as Stripe. So while there are other components at play to actually move the money around, Stripe is what drives the cashback events for the most part. Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch, but it is doable! I’m…

  • Printing to a POS-5890K thermal printer from a Raspberry Pi

    Printing to a POS-5890K thermal printer from a Raspberry Pi

    For a small project, I wanted to print some graphic receipts from a Raspberry Pi. I bought the cheapest one I could find on Amazon, the POS-5890K. (I paid €43 on Amazon.de). It’s not a very high quality device, but the price was hard to argue with. However, printing to it was a bit more…

  • You should separate your billing from entitlements

    You should separate your billing from entitlements

    Building your own entitlement service is key for supporting a modern, flexible SaaS product. Whenever I read about billing systems, there’s a lot of talk about the billing aspects but not so much around entitlements. In the spirit of sharing, and since I haven’t found any good articles about it, I decided to tell you…

  • Forward →

    Forward →

    Running a company is hard. Running a modern, inclusive, sustainable, and authentic company is much harder. One of the reasons I joined Pleo, was because it was all of those things. It was a great breath of fresh air. But not all companies are like that. All is not lost though, because companies can and…

  • Running OKR workshops for dummies (part 2)

    Running OKR workshops for dummies (part 2)

    In this part, we’ll discuss narrowing down your OKR candidates and sharing them with your stakeholders.

  • Zero waste with SaaS products

    Zero waste with SaaS products

    … is there a way to stop customers using your product wrong? Earlier this year I sat down for dinner with Miia where we talked a bit about product management, and a lot more about zero waste at Ark, a zero-waste restaurant in Copenhagen. We naturally recorded ourselves getting progressively more drunk, and you can…