Technical innovation moves fast in the Earth observation industry. But keeping up with that innovation, especially when you need the financial infrastructure to properly scale, isn’t so easy.
A successful prototype of an infrastructure project or a global monitoring initiative doesn’t translate to automatic success for a whole bunch of reasons. Here, we’re focusing on financial ones: some financial models need to be adjusted to suit the speed and complexity of modern geospatial projects.
Pay-as-you-go versus operational reality
For most of UP42’s existence, we’ve used a pre-pay credit system. Users buy credits and use them for orders. For many types of businesses, the ability to jump in, pay, and move works well. Need a one-off archive image? Or a time-sensitive tasking order? Easy. Done.
Things aren’t so simple with bigger projects. The dynamics change. Accounts with many different users and long-term monitoring missions don’t fit neatly into the credit system. The financial overhead of needing to buy credits first and then use them can drag out timelines and stretch cashflow. It forces companies to block capital that could be used elsewhere, creating a lag between investment and delivery. We decided to close this gap for our customers.
Post-payment capabilities
Our upcoming post-payment capability is the next evolution in UP42’s payment system. The technical work involves rebuilding our financial infrastructure, and the result will be an expansion of what our customers can achieve.
With post-payment at its core for larger enterprises, we’re providing financial flexibility that allows our partners to cover much more ground. Here are the biggest advantages:
- Aligned B2B revenue cycles: Whether EO data is a capital investment or an operational cost in your organization, post-payment removes the pressure of upfront allocation, keeping budgets fluid and timelines on track, so our users can align their platform spend with their own revenue cycles.
- Operational agility: You can now take on large-scale, high-density monitoring missions without the exhaustion of upfront capital lock-in. This allows for a more aggressive pursuit of new business opportunities.
- Simplified enterprise billing: Consumption-based invoicing replaces upfront payments. This is the first step, and we’re already looking at more flexible billing structures for future iterations.
Building for your enterprise needs
We’re not getting rid of our pay-as-you-go-plan, as it’s still preferred by many of our customers. We’re just looking at ways to help our users move away from pre-allocations towards a more fluid, consumption-based approach. And this is just the beginning; we have more features coming for bigger teams with bigger needs.
Curious to learn more about upcoming changes? Just reach out. Our team would be happy to answer your questions.
