In-arrears fixed fees can now be denominated in virtual currencies (custom credits). These fees will automatically deduct from customers' prepaid credit balances, similar to usage-based fees.
This enhancement enables new pricing scenarios — for example, you can now set enterprise support fees in credits that draw from the customer's prepaid enterprise commitment rather than triggering a separate charge.
Orb supports automatic top-ups, which are triggered when a customer's credit balance falls below a certain threshold. This is useful for ensuring that customers have enough credit balance to cover their usage, and can be configured to automatically top-up by a fixed amount at a specific cost basis, including issuing an invoice.
In January, Orb shipped new features designed to make your billing operations more powerful. This roundup includes custom pricing units, an enhanced capability to apply discounts in bulk, increased invoicing efficiency, and a new status page.
You asked, we listened: credits across multiple dimensions! You can now create one or multiple custom pricing units and assign pricing each to a specific price in your plans.
Once you set up the custom pricing units, you can set a unit price for each in the plan creation flow to support overage calculations. Downstream, Orb will also display usage and overage line items on your customer's invoice in the appropriate pricing unit.
For example, you might offer three types of credits: Storage, Compute, and Support. Now, you can create three custom pricing units, one for each. When you create your plan, you can add a price in each unit. As your customers accrue usage for each unit, the corresponding credit blocks will be deducted. For instance, if a customer accrued Storage usage, only the Storage credits will be deducted.
You can now apply discounts, maximums, and minimums to a subset of prices within a plan. Based on your settings, Orb will automatically calculate the discounts, maximum, and miniums on your customer invoice. For example, if you would like to apply a $100 minimum spend requirement to two out of three prices in your pricing plan, Storage and Support, then Orb will only count the spend for the two prices towards the minimum. Orb will not count the spend for the third price, Upload Events, towards the minimum.
We streamlined invoicing workflows so you can now issue one-off, immediate fixed fee invoices within minutes. In addition, we increased invoice issuance throughput by 5x, which means you can continue to count on Orb to handle large data loads and support exponential growth.
As a part of our commitment to transparency and customer trust, we released a status page. You can use the page to learn more about the reliability and uptime of Orb’s APIs, Ingest, Webhooks, and Invoicing. You can also track any reported incidents by subscribing to the page.
Do you have any questions or feedback about the product updates? Comment on the changelog post.
We've added a "maximum spend" concept to our pricing models! This allows you to configure plans with a spend-cap at the price or the plan level from the plan or subscription creation flows.
We've also added support for limiting spend on an individual invoice at the line item or invoice level through the existing invoice edits flow.
Orb's pre-purchase ledger is used to support burn-down use cases, where each event depletes a credit or real-currency balance; after a customer's balance is completely depleted, charges begin to accrue on the upcoming invoice.
Previously, Orb's pre-purchase system supported "simple" unit prices, where each event could be priced independently of others (such as $0.003 per event). As of today, Orb supports the large majority of pricing models in the pre-purchase ledger — as long as more usage for your model always means a higher deduction rate, the pre-purchase ledger can now track it! This is true of all default pricing models in Orb except for bulk pricing, where new events can lead to a lower overall deduction amount.
To learn more about configuring prepaid credits, check out the docs here.