Orb Pricing - Are you overpaying?

According to OpenView Partners report in 2023, approximately 61% of SaaS companies have either implemented or are exploring usage-based pricing models. Since these companies index on consumption, these billing tools need precision and flexibility to price according to the product strategy and usage.

Not just that, with AI many companies are adopting a combination of hybrid pricing strategies along with usage. So tracking usage metrics alone doesn’t cut it. A vanilla consumption tool isn’t needed, businesses are looking for platforms that are absolutely flexible and capable of handling what you throw at it - because who likes doing manual billing in 2024 ladled with spreadsheet fatigue and hours of back and forth?

One such flexible billing tool is Orb. Orb aims to simplify metering and billing for usage-based and hybrid models.

It’s a great tool, but is that enough?
What should a good metering and billing tool look like?
How is Orb priced and what are the nuances you don’t know?

We’ll explore all that and more in this blog. We’ll break down Orb’s pricing plans, explore its key features, and highlight where it may fall short for scaling companies. We’ll also cover an alternative that is a flexible, developer-friendly alternative for businesses looking to manage complex billing requirements with ease.

Let’s get started.

What is Orb?

Orb is a metering and pricing platform built to support usage-based billing models. It helps companies implement flexible pricing strategies by automating the process of usage tracking and billing.

Overview of Orb as a pricing and metering platform

Orb enables companies to:

1. Meter Usage

Orb enables businesses to track real-time events and data volumes to ensure accurate metering of customer usage.

1. Event Tracking: Orb ingests usage data through APIs and cloud storage solutions (like S3) to process large volumes of events in real time.
2. Custom Metrics: Businesses can define custom metrics using SQL-based rollups, which allow for aggregation and transformation of data streams into billable usage metrics.
3. Scalable Ingestion: With the ability to handle up to 250,000+ events per second -they do have caps on how many events you can ingest and a high volume should be notified earlier.

2. Build Pricing Models

Orb can help you implement complex and flexible pricing strategies that help with your business needs.

1. Usage-Based Pricing: Charge customers based on real-time usage metrics, such as API calls, data processed, or features accessed.
2. Tiered Pricing: Implement pricing tiers where customers pay different rates based on usage thresholds or plans.
3. Seat-Based Billing: Manage per-user or per-seat pricing for teams that scale with user growth.
4. Fixed Fees and Hybrid Models: Combine fixed subscription fees with variable usage-based charges to create hybrid pricing strategies.

Want to implement more hybrid pricing scenarios and see what’s possible - check out this platform

3. Generate Invoices

Orb automates the end-to-end invoicing process for usage-based and recurring billing models. Here’s what their invoicing capabilities include:

1. Automated Invoicing: Generate invoices dynamically based on real-time consumption and preconfigured pricing rules.
2. Threshold Billing: Trigger invoices when usage surpasses defined thresholds.
3. Credits and Allocations: Manage customer credits, refunds, or allocations.
4. Tax and Accounting Integrations: Integrate with accounting software and tax platforms for tax compliance, reporting, and invoicing workflows.

Who uses Orb? Target audience and key industries

1. SaaS companies: Businesses that require metering and billing for their usage-based plans.
2. Finance teams: To streamline recurring invoicing and reduce manual billing errors.
3. Product managers: Teams looking to implement flexible pricing models.

Key industries using Orb include cloud infrastructure, AI, software platforms, and API-first companies.

Orb's Features

Core Features and Capabilities

1. Usage Tracking: Orb allows businesses to meter real-time usage with event tracking for billing calculations.
2. Rollups: Orb aggregates usage data, offering frequent summaries (e.g., every 30 seconds) to ensure updated billing data.
3. Pricing Models: Basic support for usage-based, tiered, and volume-based pricing.
4. Ingestion API: Processes up to 1,000 events per second and manage billing across high data volumes.

Strengths: What Orb Does Well

1. High Throughput: Orb can scale ingestion volumes up to 86 million events per day with rollup optimizations.
2. API Integration: Orb’s APIs allow technical teams to integrate it with existing data pipelines.

Gaps: Limitations of Orb’s Offering

1. Limited Flexibility for Pricing Configurations: Orb’s tools are limited to basic configurations like tiered and volume-based pricing, making complex hybrid models difficult to implement. Like for instance it can do a combination of subscription and usage, but not advanced calculations.
2. Scalability Challenges: While Orb handles high event volumes, businesses especially enterprises with billions of events daily require additional configuration to ensure throughput. For instance a GenAI B2C company in its growth stage will scale to billions of events per day - in which case Orb isn’t the right platform to handle the scale.
3. Implementation Complexity: Orb’s setup often requires significant engineering resources to integrate fully with existing tech stacks.
4. Real-Time Insights: Rollup intervals (e.g., every 30 seconds) may not provide true real-time metering for high-speed billing needs.

Dissecting Orb’s Pricing Model

Orb’s pricing is structured around three tiers: Core, Advanced, and Enterprise. Core focuses on getting started small-medium sized companies while Enterprise is a custom plan for a larger organization.

1. Core Plan: Starting at $720/month and goes up to $3450/month (Billed Annually)

The Core plan is ideal for businesses just beginning to implement usage-based billing or managing moderate billing volumes. It includes:

1. Billing Volume: Up to $100,000 in billing per month.
2. Overage Fee: 0.8% for billings above the $100K threshold.
3. Custom pricing: Beyond 500k events, you need to work out a custom pricing

Additionally there are add-ons in each tier, even though the pricing is pretty steep.

2. Advanced and Enterprise Plan - Custom Pricing

The Advanced plan is built for businesses managing higher billing volumes and requiring integrations with finance tools and workflows.

The only difference between both is the support - though it’s pretty unclear as advanced plans offer premium support and enterprise dedicated.

Limitations of Orb Pricing

1. High Entry Cost: Starting at $720/month may not suit small or early-stage businesses.
2. Hidden Custom Pricing: Advanced and Enterprise plans require contacting sales, which limits transparency but only makes us wonder how expensive the entire suite of functionality could be.
3. Overage Fees: For companies scaling rapidly, the 0.8% overage fees could add significant costs.

Not just that, remember, Orb isn’t a complete billing tool - which means you don’t have detailed or real-time reporting or access to reports like A/R aging, Rev Rec, Dunning and so much more. You need a completely different billing system that’s going to pull-up these reports making it ++ to your existing billing system budget. It doesn’t end there, though Orb is good, they don’t have entitlements - which will help you gate and monetize your features.

A beginner $750/month plan - you do not have access to integrations - which means they either come as an add-on cost or an upgrade to a higher tier. That’s pretty costly isn’t it?

For a vanilla metering and billing system, Orb is a bit on the pricey side of things. If you count add-on costs like payment gateways and the amount you’ll be shelling out - sounds like you will use half the money in maintaining a billing system!

So what's the alternative?

Let’s look at Togai by Zuora.

Comparing Orb to Togai: Why Togai Stands Out for Usage-Based Pricing

While Orb addresses basic metering and pricing needs, Togai provides advanced features designed for flexibility, scalability, and real-time accuracy.

Key Features of Togai in Detail

1. Real-Time Metering and Tracking

Togai’s real-time metering functionality tracks customer usage down to the last unit. Whether your business charges based on API calls, storage, or bandwidth, Togai ensures accurate and up-to-date data for billing purposes.

Learn more about Togai’s metering engine >

2. Flexible Pricing Configurations

Togai allows businesses to configure and manage a variety of pricing models, including:

1. Tiered Pricing Models: Offer structured subscription levels to cater to different customer segments.
2. Usage-Based Pricing: Process billions of events, whether it's API calls, bandwidth, or any other metric, Togai ensures transparent and error-free billing that reflects actual usage
3. Threshold Discounts: Apply automatic discounts or changes when usage exceeds specified limits.
4. Pay-As-You-Go Models: Allow customers to pay for exactly what they use. With Togai’s wallets and credits you can track your customers’ usage, set alerts and notifications to notify about top-ups and more.

And so many more pricing variations your business needs. Easily adapt pricing strategies to meet customer demands or market trends without additional manual input.

Learn more about pricing configurations >

3. Automate Recurring Invoices

Togai automates the generation of recurring invoices, reducing the risk of errors and freeing up time for finance teams. Togai simplifies invoicing by -

1. Customized Invoicing Template: With Togai’s invoicing templates, create customized invoice templates for your customers based on their needs and requirements! It comes with the billing tool - so there are no extra hidden fees!
2. Streamlined Billing Cycles: Bill your customer however you want, be it annual, monthly, quarterly effortlessly.
3. Track Invoice Statuses: Gain real-time visibility into invoice statuses - be it void, paid, prepaid, postpaid and more, enabling better financial management.

Learn more about invoicing >

4. Entitlement Management

Manage customer access and ensure customers get to use appropriate features and services aligned with their subscription plan. With entitlements you can gate features or plans - create self-serve tiers, provide top-ups, credits, set alerts to notify limits and so much more.

1. Access Control: Define and enforce access rights for features or services based on subscription tiers.
2. Dynamic Updates: Automatically adjust entitlements as customers upgrade or modify their plans.
3. Enhanced Retention: Minimize churn by offering tailored plans and monitoring entitlement-related issues proactively.
4. Upsell features: Gate access and sell your most-stand-out features and add-ons, bring in more upsell and cross sell opportunities.

Learn more about entitlement management >

5. Customer Portal

With a self-service portal, Togai gives customers the ability to track payments, manage subscriptions, and resolve billing queries independently. Improve customer satisfaction while reducing the support workload for businesses.

Learn more about customer portal >

How Togai Stands Out

While Orb’s pricing structure supports usage-based and hybrid billing, Togai offers more flexibility and control for SaaS businesses:

1. Customizable Pricing Models: Beyond SQL, Togai allows no-code pricing configurations.
2. Real-Time Metering Accuracy: Track usage with millisecond-level precision.
3. Transparent Pricing: Togai offers clear pricing without overage surprises.
4. Integrations: Integrate Togai into your existing tech stack with over 50+ integrations across CRM, CPM, accounting, taxation and payment processing tools
5. Custom widgets: Togai’s widget builder helps you track metrics like total active credits, closing balances, or feature usage in real-time. It also lets you add widgets for credits, wallets, or entitlements and customize table columns to display data points that matter most—such as account status, effective dates, or credit amounts.

Is Orb Pricing Right for Your Business?

Orb is a great solution for SaaS companies looking to automate usage-based billing and leverage SQL metrics. However, its higher entry costs and overage fees may be challenging for fast-scaling businesses.

Looking for a more flexible pricing platform?

Contact Sales and see how Togai simplifies complex pricing.