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# A look inside Zuora's patent portfolio

> A summarized tour of a few patents behind Zuora's platform, from the multi-tenant extensible billing system to custom objects and custom fields.

There's a perspective around here that we do some cool things at Zuora, but no one knows about them. A goal is to shine light on these less well-lit corners of Zuora. As of April 2025, [Zuora holds 49 issued U.S. patents](https://patents.google.com/?assignee=ZUORA%2c+INC.) and 8 issued foreign patents across our suite of products. We also have 20 U.S. patent applications and 5 foreign applications pending.

Being a Zuora customer comes with benefits, and you can't get this sort of stuff elsewhere. Unless, of course, we've licensed you 😊

Here are just a couple of examples from our patent portfolio, summarized for convenience — you can see the patents themselves for more details:

* [**Multi-Tenant Extensible Billing System**](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220222717A1/) — a method of using a price-calculating microservice in combination with consumption-based usage and rating microservices to generate invoices. This forms part of the foundation of our [massively scalable mediation engine](https://knowledgecenter.zuora.com/Zuora_Platform/Extensibility/Mediation).
* [**Extending Data Model of Monolithic Database Through a Microservice for a Multi-Tenant Platform**](https://patents.google.com/patent/US11734092B2/).
* [**Systems and Methods for Providing Custom Objects for a Multi-Tenant Platform with Microservices Architecture**](https://patents.google.com/patent/US11615066B2) — used for our Custom Fields feature. This extends our standard tenant database with a custom-fields database and service; using object maps, the custom-fields service enables each tenant to add custom fields as needed.