Subscriptions no longer need to start at the beginning of the day. Previously, Orb enforced that all subscriptions needed to start at midnight in the customer's timezone. Now, you can pass any ISO formatted timestamp to the start_date parameter in the subscription creation request. If no timezone is provided in the string, Orb will assume the customer's timezone.
We've made it easier for your team to remove customers from Orb, directly from the customer detail page. If you still prefer to do so with our API, check out our docs.
Orb invoices that contain fixed fee quantity changes are easier to understand.
Orb will only charge for the new number of licenses at the appropriate tier (vs. a previous version where we subtracted the licenses customers had already paid for from the total number of licenses purchased)
We also updated the invoice display and description copy to reflect this. What was once called "Partial service period credit" is now "Prorated adjustment"
Customer metadata can now be set and retrieved in the API! Specified as key-value pairs on the Customer object, you can now add metadata when creating or updating a customer, and receive that metadata back when retrieving that customer. Metadata is also visible and editable on the customer detail page in the webapp.
As part of the effort to bring Orb's invoices to a broader range of audiences, the invoice portal is now available in Portuguese. Based on the language setting of your browser, the explicit lang=pt query parameter, or the language of your Customer, Orb will automatically internationalize all text into Brazilian Portuguese.
If there's a language you'd like to see supported for your customers, please reach out to team@withorb.com. We've built our framework such that we can quickly add new language support in the coming months.
Orb's billable metrics layer now supports two time-based SQL functions, EARLIEST_BY and LATEST_BY. These can be used in combination with the timestamp of an event to perform queries that take the latest or earliest event in a billing period. They behave as follows:
EARLIEST_BY(value_property, time_based_property): Returns the earliest value of value_property ordered by time_based_property.LATEST_BY(value_property, time_based_property): Returns the latest value of value_property ordered by time_based_property.
For example, you might use these functions to compute the earliest and latest storage_gbvalues seen during the month to naively compute storage added.
Note that Orb automatically applies time range filtering to billable metric queries based on the billing period bounds.
Orb makes it easy to manage tax for your customers. You can add each customers Tax ID directly in the platform, and we support a one-click tax exemption status for customers that qualify. Both of these ensure that the invoices you send your customers through Orb are always tax compliant. Read our docs for more information.
One of the most common workflows for any revenue-generating organization will eventually be charging, collecting, and reporting sales tax. Today, we're announcing our Avalara integration, which comes with full support for all Orb invoices. To begin using Avalara, reach out to the Orb team to enable the functionality in your environment. You can read our docs or watch this quick demo to see how it works.
Our product philosophy at Orb has always been to reduce data infrastructure that your team needs to build. We've delivered on that with a truly extensible SQL layer when configuring metrics, so you don't have to maintain that business logic outside of Orb. In many cases, that means you need to send Orb a raw stream of events — if you serve a large customer base or handle a lot of traffic, you should be able to use Orb without any aggregation or transformations up front.
Whereas Orb's ingestion API is meant for services that emit tens of thousands of events a minute, this new functionality is built to support hundreds of thousands of events a second.
Orb's streaming aggregation functionality requires you to set up an S3 bucket in your account — we handle listening for updates to the bucket (no specific path structure required!), doing the data de-duplication, rollup, and ingesting events directly into your Orb account.
To learn more about what's required for this setup, see the docs on high throughput workloads.
You can configure invoice email delivery down to the individual customer, not just at the account level.
The Invoice emails option in the customer details section will show "Not configured" when the account wide email settings are off. When the account wide setting is on, the field will show either "Send automatically" when on or off. The customer setting can be updated via the customer edit dialog.
Edits can be done manually in our webapp, or via API. Visit the create customer API docs and edit customer API docs where there is a new email_delivery option to control this configuration.