Orb

Orb describes itself as a revenue design platform rather than a billing tool, organised into billing for metering and invoicing usage, pricing for modelling and iterating on plans, and finance for contracting, collecting and closing.

Treating pricing as a discipline the software supports, rather than a configuration it stores, is the distinguishing idea. Most billing systems assume a company knows its prices and needs them applied. Orb's premise is that modern companies change pricing repeatedly, and that the ability to model a change, understand its effect on existing customers and roll it out without breaking historic contracts is itself the hard part. Any company that has tried to migrate a customer base onto a new pricing model recognises that as the real work.

Backdating and backfilling changes is called out under accuracy and it is a revealing detail. Usage data arrives late, is occasionally wrong, and sometimes needs correcting after invoices have issued. A billing system that cannot restate a period without manual credit notes forces finance teams into spreadsheets at exactly the moment accuracy matters most.

Granular usage metering underpins all of it, since a system can only bill for what it can measure precisely, and consumption pricing puts far more weight on the meter than seat-based billing ever did. Orb publishes a revenue design playbook alongside the product, positioning the concept as a methodology rather than a feature list. Documentation is public. Pricing is not published and is arranged through sales.