Orb now has support for creating hierarchical relationships between your customers to power flexible pricing, usage aggregation, and invoicing.
This capability is particularly valuable when your customers desire to aggregate usage across multiple customers on a single parent invoice while maintaining the ability to configure pricing per customer or groups of customers.
Learn more about this new powerful capability in our product documentation
Subscription modification endpoints now support an optional boolean parameter: allow_invoice_credit_or_void.
• Defaults to True (maintains existing behavior).
• Set to False to prevent modifications that would create a credit note or void an invoice. Instead, such requests will fail with a validation error.
When to use this
Certain modifications, like canceling a subscription mid-period with an in-advance fixed fee, typically generate credit notes. If you’re confident your modifications shouldn’t create these, set allow_invoice_credit_or_void=False as a safeguard.
Equivalent to a Dry-Run
This functions similarly to sending a dry-run request and previewing changes first, which allows for more precise validation of side effects.
Supported Endpoints
We have launched a new endpoint to update a customer's payment methods in Orb from their Stripe payment methods. (And a second endpoint using the customer's external ID.)
This endpoint can be called before taking an action that may cause the customer to be charged, ensuring that the most up-to-date payment method is charged.
We have launched a new API endpoint for creating credit notes, enabling you to issue credit notes for specific line items on an invoice. This feature allows for programmatic issuance of credit notes, supporting bulk actions for multiple customers and enhancing customer experience by providing faster processing for refunds or adjustments.
For detailed information on how to credit an invoice, refer to the credit notes section in our documentation.
Trial periods are an effective lever in product-led and sales-led GTM motions. Orb's capabilities for managing trials just got a big upgrade.
We've added a new API endpoint, Update Trial, that allows you to change or extend the end date of subscription's trial. By default, Orb will only shift the trial end date, leaving the rest of the subscription unchanged. You can also specify an option to shift the rest of the subscription by the same duration.
With this new endpoint, it's possible to retroactively extend a trial after it has already ended—if you need to give a prospect a few extra trial days to convert, Orb makes this operation easy.
When creating a new subscription or scheduling a plan change, you're able to override the trial duration.
Managing trials in the dashboard is as easy and powerful as via the API. In the subscription card, use the "Update trial" action to make adjustments to the trial period.
When creating a new subscription or scheduling a plan change, you may now select a plan version to subscribe to. Previously, new subscriptions could only and plan changes could only target the default version.
This functionality is also available in the API, via the plan_version_number field in the create subscription endpoint, and the schedule plan change endpoint. If the field is null or absent, the default version will be used.
We have introduced a new API endpoint, Get Event Volume, that allows you to fetch hourly event volume counts. The volume count is aggregated via the timestamp field on the event (not ingestion time). Note, this means that late-arriving events increment the volume count for the hour window the timestamp is in, not the latest hour window.
Orb's API now supports adding, removing, and replacing prices when creating a new subscription, or changing the plan for an existing subscription (See: Subscription Price Overrides). This is useful when a new customer has negotiated one or more different prices for a specific plan than the plan's default prices.
For information on how to use this feature, see the API specification:
You can now set a customer’s tax exemption status - tax exempt or not tax exempt directly from the Create Customer or the Update Customer API endpoints. This feature enables smoother integrations and more automated workflows for managing tax compliance. You could use this to: exclude tax collection for customers in specific countries, mark tax-exempt organizations like nonprofits or government entities as tax-exempt in Orb upon creation, or manage tax externally for a specific subset of customers.
More information about Orb's supported tax providers can be found here.
Orb's API now supports the dry running of requests. Dry running API requests allows you to validate the correctness of a request without making any actual changes to the system. This feature is particularly useful for ensuring that the request does not contain any errors and for previewing the potential response of a mutation before committing it.
Dry-running a request is as simple as including a “Dry-Run” header with a value of “True”, as shown below:
curl --request POST \ --url https://api.withorb.com/v1/subscriptions \ --header 'Dry-Run: True' \ --header 'Accept: application/json' \ --header 'Authorization: Bearer null' \ --header 'Content-Type: application/json'
More information can be found in our documentation.