Over the past few months, many customers have launched GenAI features and wrestle with the same question: "How do we monetize this?" This inspired us to build something to help our customers iterate and refine their pricing strategy.

Orb Simulations lets you build scenarios for different pricing strategies and run them against historical usage data in Orb. You can visualize price changes before you make them, without any of the complicated data legwork or churn risk of live testing with customers.

Use cases:

1. Identify optimal price points to reduce churn or customer impact
2. Experiment with different value metrics (tokens? requests? outcomes?)
3. Model revenue impact across different pricing models

Try Simulations now in Beta, or learn more in our docs. When made generally available, we’ll update you on pricing. For new customers, join the waitlist.

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

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:

• Create subscription API
• Schedule plan change API

Orb now supports specifying a custom billing cadence or one-time service period. Previously, prices could only recur monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. Now you're able to specify a custom duration in days or months. You can also now specify a custom service period duration for one-time prices, which determines the duration of the line item.

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.

Orb now allows adding and removing prices during subscription creation and plan change. Previously, plan overrides only allowed prices to be modified. This allows the creation of a wide variety of custom plans using a small number of template plans, without having to construct the new plans from scratch. It also makes it easy to create add-ons to existing plans and subscriptions.

See the docs here: Subscription price overrides

Orb's backfill feature allows you to amend or replace events in a given time frame. This can be useful in cases where revising events is necessary, such as in the case of incorrect event reporting.

Backfills now support filtering across time ranges and with computed properties, which enables the expressiveness of SQL when replacing events. Using the `deprecation_filter` field requires `replace_existing_events` to be true and the filter must be an expression that is coercible to a boolean - for more information, see the docs here. 

Orb's data exports feature now supports invoice billings broken down by line item through the Invoice Line Item Billing resource. This information can be used to power use cases like: calculating precise discount amounts and breaking down billed amounts by price.

For customers with data exports included in your plan, this resource will automatically be included in the list of resources exported to your data destination.

This resource is a powerful way to understand and track the individual line item values for invoices that have been billed. As opposed to the Daily Line Item Revenue resource, this resource avoids the need to filter to line items for invoices that have yet to be billed and aggregates line item amounts into a single value instead of one value per day.

For more information about this resource, please check out our documentation. If you'd like to learn more about the data exports product generally, please feel free to look through our docs or reach out to the Orb team.

Orb now offers recognized revenue, billings, deferred revenue, and unbilled revenue reports in the web application. With daily granularity into your revenue, you gain visibility into the essential financial metrics that allow you to make informed decisions and streamline your accounting processes.  

With Orb Reporting:

• You get unprecedented visibility into your various revenue streams. Orb Reporting offers a fresh and consolidated view of your billings, recognized, deferred revenue, and unbilled revenue, all centralized across any time and data horizon.
  
  

• Revenue recognition becomes quick and seamless. Orb supports simple compliance with ASC 606 standards in mind, eliminating the need to manually adjust for non-monthly aligned line items, credits, expirations, minimums, discounts, and plan changes. You can even understand the financial health of your business: The filtering and pivoting capabilities allow you to investigate your revenue data, identify and mitigate any potential risks, have better revenue predictability, and learn about what’s driving growth for the company.

  
  

  

  
  

• Finally, you can confidently answer questions about invoices—down to a singular usage event. Drill down into the details of any account, invoice, plan, or item with just a few clicks and without pinging your data engineering team.

Learn more here and let us know what you think! 

Orb now allows adding and editing individual adjustments (discounts, minimums, and maximums) on a subscription. You can programmatically model adjustments to your pricing while maintaining total control over billing and invoicing; this can be used to allow customers to redeem coupons on a subscription or to allow your support team to easily give discounts as needed. Adjustments can be backdated into the past or scheduled for the future, and Orb will always correct your customer's invoices to ensure correct billing. Adjustment intervals can be modified using our price intervals API — see the docs here.