DataStax
2025
Bringing Clarity to Enterprise Billing
Designed a new usage tab that gave enterprise admins full visibility and control over costs across their entire organization.
The Context
Accurate data that nobody trusted.
As Astra DB grew into enterprise accounts managing multiple organizations, teams, and deployments, the billing experience didn't scale with it. The data was correct, but it was scattered. Admins responsible for six-figure cloud spend couldn't answer basic questions from their finance teams.
The business consequence was direct: billing disputes, delayed payments, and a rising support ticket volume that eroded confidence in the platform at exactly the accounts DataStax most needed to retain.
The Problem
Three questions users couldn't answer.
Customer interviews, internal audits, and billing ticket reviews pointed to the same three failure modes — none of which were about calculation errors.
“Where is our spend coming from?”
No way to trace costs back to specific databases, users, or teams.
“Which resources are driving increases?”
Billing and usage lived on separate pages with inconsistent data across them.
“Are we within our limits?”
No trend visibility, no spend forecasting, and no proactive warning before limits were breached.
The problem wasn’t inaccurate numbers, it was the absence of context around them. Customers needed a single, trustworthy surface that explained where costs came from, how they were trending, and what they could do about it. That surface didn’t exist yet.
The Design Contribution
A net-new product surface: the usage tab.
The existing billing page showed a credit breakdown and nothing else. My role was to identify that the product was missing an entire surface and define what it needed to be. The Usage tab was conceived as a dedicated, enterprise-level view that bridged the gap between billing totals and the underlying activity driving them. It introduced a drill-down hierarchy from the enterprise total, down to individual organizations, down to specific resources, giving admins a clear chain of accountability for every dollar of spend.
Before
Billing Only
Credit breakdown with no usage context, no trend data, and no ability to trace costs to specific resources or teams.
After
Billing + Usage
Enterprise-level charts, org-level breakdowns, resource drill-down, historical tracking, and in-depth usage reports.
The Impact
Trust restored, support load reduced.
A 40% drop in support tickets and disputes within the first month of launching was the clearest signal that the new surface worked — not because the numbers changed, but because users could now understand them. For DataStax's enterprise sales and customer success teams, a billing experience that admins trusted became a meaningful factor in retention conversations.
