UserHub

UserHub is a user-based billing and monetization platform specifically designed for business-to-business (B2B) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies. Founded in 2022 by Patrick Rafferty and Silas Sewell, the New York-based startup aims to provide a unified solution for managing the entire customer lifecycle.

The inspiration for UserHub stemmed from the founders' own frustrations with existing user management and billing products. While working at Reonomy, a commercial real estate AI-powered SaaS product, Rafferty (then VP of Product and Engineering) and Sewell (then Principal Engineer) found their in-house tools for these functions to be underdeveloped compared to leading SaaS products, despite having a large engineering team. Sewell, who had experience developing authorization and subscription billing systems at several SaaS companies, concluded that customer identity and billing needed to be combined into a single, cohesive platform.

UserHub's platform allows SaaS vendors to manage users, accounts, subscriptions, and pricing from a single location. It is engineered for application-layer SaaS products where the end-users are human and customer accounts can scale from a single user to thousands. The business model is based on two main factors: the number of paid end-users under management and the number of seats required by the client's employees for the back-office admin console.

Key features of the platform include embeddable, self-service modules that SaaS companies can integrate into their products in minutes. These modules handle functions like user management, invitations, seat management, checkout processes, invoices, plan management, and billing portals. This allows the end-customers of a SaaS product to easily add team members, upgrade plans, or manage licenses, which helps UserHub's clients unlock expansion revenue. The platform is available as a hosted solution or can be integrated via an API, and it offers pre-built connectivity to popular authorization and billing platforms like Auth0, Stripe, Google Cloud Identity, and Firebase. In April 2024, UserHub announced it had secured $3.2 million in pre-seed funding, led by 468 Capital, to expand its engineering team and accelerate product development.

Keywords: user-based billing, B2B SaaS, monetization platform, subscription management, customer lifecycle management, seat-based pricing, expansion revenue, self-service billing, user management, recurring billing, Patrick Rafferty, Silas Sewell, 468 Capital, application-layer SaaS, billing infrastructure, license management, plan upgrades, checkout optimization, SaaS monetization, API integration, Auth0 integration, Stripe integration