9 best Orb billing alternatives for SaaS and AI companies

Updated in October 2026.

Billing is the backbone of your revenue strategy.

For SaaS, fintech, and especially AI-native companies experimenting with AI pricing strategies and usage-based models, the wrong billing system can slow growth, drain resources, and create headaches for Finance and RevOps teams. (Not to mention when engineering teams are forced to step in and help.)

Orb's usage-based billing platform excels in certain scenarios, but eventually, teams realize they need more from their billing tool than just usage-based features.

Whether we’re talking deeper subscription management, stronger revenue recognition, or simply a platform that scales with your business complexity, there’s an Orb alternative out there.

That’s why in this guide, we break down the leading Orb alternatives from unified revenue platforms like Alguna, to usage metering layers like Metronome.

What changed for Orb in 2026?

The usage-based billing market consolidated fast this year. Three of the best-known usage-first platforms were bought by larger companies within seven months:

• Orb joined Adyen. Adyen agreed to buy Orb for $335 million in an all-cash deal, which closed in early July 2026. Orb is now an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary that Adyen says it will run under an incubator model.
• Metronome joined Stripe. Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome on January 14, 2026, and Metronome now powers advanced usage billing inside Stripe Billing.
• m3ter joined Salesforce. Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire m3ter in June, and the deal completed on July 1, 2026. m3ter now sits within Salesforce's Agentforce Revenue Management.

To be fair to Orb, Adyen has said it will keep Orb's operations running as they are during the first phase of integration and will continue to support companies that use other payment providers. Existing customers shouldn't expect overnight changes.

Still, an acquisition is a sensible moment to reassess. A few questions are worth asking:

• Whose roadmap is it now? Adyen bought Orb to connect billing with payments. Features that serve that strategy are likely to come first.
• How independent will your payment setup stay? Multi-provider support is promised for now. If payment-provider independence matters to you, get the commitment in your contract.
• Is pricing going to change? Orb's pricing was already custom and quote-only. Renewal is the point where most teams find out.

For many teams, the bigger question is strategic: do you want your billing system owned by your payment processor or your CRM vendor, or by an independent platform that works across both?

What is Orb?

Orb is a usage-based billing platform founded in 2021 by Alvaro Morales and Kshitij Grover, two former Asana engineers. It turns raw product usage events (API calls, tokens, compute time) into billable metrics and invoices, and it's popular with AI, infrastructure, and developer-tool companies that bill on consumption.

Orb's core strengths are high-volume event ingestion, SQL-defined billing metrics, retention of raw usage events so past periods can be recalculated, and pricing simulations that test changes against historical usage. Higher tiers add integrations with Salesforce, NetSuite, and data warehouses.

Orb pricing: Orb sells three tiers, Core, Advanced, and Enterprise. All three are custom-priced and sales-led, with no public dollar amounts. Quotes are based mainly on billing volume and usage-event volume, with a platform fee on the Advanced and Enterprise tiers.

Orb is a strong fit when billing is primarily an engineering problem. It tends to feel thinner once billing becomes a finance and go-to-market problem too, which is where most of the reasons for switching come from.

8 reasons teams look for Orb billing alternatives

To find out where that friction comes from, we spoke with finance and RevOps leaders who are either evaluating a move away from Orb or have already switched.

Orb built its reputation on usage metering, and for many engineering-led teams it does that job well. The friction usually shows up later, once billing is no longer just a metering problem and starts to involve plan design, payments, finance systems, and what customers see on their invoices.

• Rigid plan and pricing structure: Supporting monthly/annual plans, included usage, optional overages, and annual commitments paid monthly requires multiple plan variants.
  
  One user maintains four variants per logical plan and must move customers between them when overages are enabled or disabled.

“For every plan that we have on [Orb], we have four variants of that plan. We have the plan, the annual version, the plan overages, and then the annual overages version of the plan.”

- Head of Finance at Series A tech company

• Failed-payment handling: The system can create or upgrade a subscription before the initial payment succeeds, allowing customers to use the product despite a failed charge. The buyer wanted an atomic “charge first, then activate” flow.
• International payment complexity: India was especially difficult because 3DS mandates for the base plan did not reliably cover later off-session overage charges.
• Cost/value concerns: One customer felt Orb was too expensive for what remained its primary function (billing and invoicing) while they continued to meter usage and maintain analytics internally.
• Performance at scale: A company replacing Orb reported that it becomes slow when processing large event volumes and recalculating usage. They were concerned about performance as event volume grows.
• Limited customer-facing usage transparency: Buyers wanted clearer invoices, credit balances, usage ledgers, and mid-month visibility into consumption and projected charges. Orb was described as too opaque in these areas.
• Weak finance-system integration: One evaluator disliked having SaaS invoicing in QuickBooks and usage billing in Orb, and wanted stronger QuickBooks integration, two-way payment sync, and per-customer revenue visibility.

“They don’t treat QuickBooks as a first-class integration… I don’t want to be in two billing solutions. I want to be in one.”

- Head of Finance at Series A tech company

• Slow support for edge cases: The current user cited delays fixing smaller operational issues, such as regenerating expired invoice-payment links through a self-service API.

Orb usage-based billing: Comparison overview

Here's how the nine Orb alternatives in this guide compare. Pricing reflects public pricing pages and independent trackers as of October 2026; always confirm with the vendor.

9 Orb alternatives that can handle usage-based billing at scale

1. Alguna: Best Orb alternative for usage-based billing

YC-backed Alguna is an AI-native revenue platform that unifies the entire quote-to-cash process for AI, SaaS, and fintech companies.

Pricing, quoting, contracts, usage metering, invoicing, collections, and revenue recognition all live in one no-code system, so sales, finance, and RevOps work from the same data instead of stitching tools together.

Where Orb is built around metering, Alguna is built around the whole revenue workflow. You can capture usage events in real time (API calls, tokens, transactions), rate them against any pricing model, and turn them into invoices automatically.

Customers see their usage, credits, and charges in a self-serve portal, so there are no surprises at the end of the month. And because Alguna is independent, you can bring your own payment processor rather than being tied to one provider's roadmap.

"Alguna enables complex usage-based billing for us in a way that other products can't."

Shane Curran, CEO at Evervault

Read the case study

Alguna vs Orb billing

Key features:

• Flexible pricing and packaging: Build fixed, unit-based, tiered, graduated, volume, seat-based, percentage-based, credit-based, and hybrid models through a no-code interface. Subscription phases and custom schedules let you combine commitments, included usage, and overages in a single subscription rather than maintaining separate plan variants.
• Native no-code CPQ and contract management: Sales teams build quotes from your product catalog, route them through approvals, and collect e-signatures in Alguna. Signed terms, including ramp contracts and mid-term changes, flow straight into billing without a handoff.
• Usage metering and billing automation: Ingest events via API or CSV with unlimited event volume included, define custom metrics, sync usage to your data warehouse, and bill on any schedule
• Invoicing, collections, and an AI agent for accounts receivable: Hosted invoices, multi-currency support, automated dunning, and an AI agent that follows up on overdue invoices, captures promises to pay, and flags disputes
• Revenue recognition and reporting: Revenue insights, customer insights, A/R aging, and automated SaaS revenue recognition give finance a trustworthy view of billed, recognized, and recurring revenue
• Integrations: Native connections to HubSpot, Salesforce, QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Stripe, and data warehouses, plus an API, webhooks, a TypeScript SDK, and an MCP server

Pros:

• One platform covers pricing, quoting, billing, collections, and revenue recognition, so there's a single source of truth for revenue
• Finance and RevOps teams can launch plans, change prices, and manage accounts without engineering
• Usage-based and hybrid billing were part of the design from day one, not bolted onto a subscription engine
• Flat, published pricing with no revenue share, and unlimited events and seats included
• Independent of any payment processor or CRM vendor

Cons:

• As a Y Combinator S23 company, Alguna is a newer entrant than legacy vendors
• Very early startups selling a single simple subscription may not need the full platform yet

Best for:

• B2B SaaS and AI companies that run self-serve plans and custom enterprise contracts side by side
• High-growth AI and fintech companies experimenting with AI pricing models such as tokens, credits, and outcome-based pricing
• Finance and RevOps teams that want to own pricing and billing changes in one no-code system

Pricing: Alguna's Starter plan is free (up to 10 invoices a month). Growth starts at $699 per month and adds CPQ, e-signature, CRM and accounting integrations, and warehouse sync. Enterprise Scale is custom and adds multi-entity billing, NetSuite, bring-your-own payment processor, automated revenue recognition, and white-glove migration. There's no percentage of revenue on any plan.

"Alguna ticked every box I needed. Most importantly, it gave me a clear overview of revenue movements, something Stripe just couldn't provide."

Adam Liska, Co-founder and CEO at Airspeed (formerly Glyphic)

2. Stripe Billing: Best for startups already using Stripe payments

Stripe Billing is Stripe's subscription and invoicing product. It's developer-friendly and sits on top of Stripe Payments, which makes it a natural first billing tool for early-stage startups that already process cards through Stripe.

Since Stripe completed its Metronome acquisition, Metronome powers more complex usage billing for Stripe customers, but it's sold and priced separately.

Stripe Billing on its own still isn't built for complex B2B contracts, and many companies start looking at Stripe Billing alternatives as they scale.

Key features:

• Recurring subscription management: Create plans with monthly, annual, or custom intervals, free trials, and coupons. Stripe automates recurring charges on saved payment methods and generates an invoice for each cycle.
• Meter-based usage billing: Report usage via API and Stripe calculates charges using per-unit, tiered, or volume pricing. More complex multi-dimensional usage is handled through Metronome.
• Developer APIs: Well-documented APIs and client libraries for customers, subscriptions, coupons, and usage, with webhooks for billing events like paid invoices and cancellations

Pros:

• Payments and billing live in one platform, so there's no separate gateway integration
• Stripe's developer experience lets engineering teams set up billing logic quickly
• Global payment methods and currencies are supported out of the box

Cons:

• The billing fee is a percentage of volume on top of processing fees, which gets expensive at scale
• Contract management, CPQ, and approvals for larger deals are limited
• Non-technical users often find editing subscriptions and proration in the dashboard less intuitive
• Deeper adoption increases lock-in to Stripe's payments ecosystem

Best for:

• Startups and small businesses with standard subscription billing that already use Stripe for payments
• Self-serve or B2C SaaS that charges cards on a schedule with light usage tracking

Pricing: Pay-as-you-go pricing is 0.7% of billing volume, on top of Stripe's payment processing fees. Metronome-powered usage billing is priced separately.

3. Chargebee: Best Orb alternative for standard B2B or B2B subscription models

Chargebee is a subscription management and recurring billing platform that has been around for more than a decade. It's best known for helping SaaS and ecommerce businesses automate subscription workflows like trials, upgrades, and renewals.

Chargebee has added usage-based billing over time, but its core strength remains subscriptions.

Key features:

• Comprehensive subscription management: Products and plans with flexible billing cycles, trials, setup fees, add-ons, quantity-based plans, and automatic proration on upgrades and downgrades
• Hybrid billing: Usage charges can sit alongside subscriptions, which covers common overage and consumption add-on scenarios
• Integration ecosystem: Connections to more than 30 payment gateways, plus major CRMs, ERPs, and accounting tools

Pros:

• A mature, well-tested feature set for recurring billing, proration, and cancellations
• Finance teams benefit from built-in accounting and tax integrations
• A free Starter plan makes it easy to get started

Cons:

• Usage-first pricing takes significant engineering effort to set up and maintain
• Implementations can be long, and the platform can feel heavy for simple models
• Overage fees on billing volume add up as revenue grows

Best for:

• Mid-stage SaaS and subscription businesses that need a full-featured recurring billing system
• Standard B2B or B2C models with monthly or annual plans and occasional usage overages

Pricing: The Starter plan is free up to $250K in cumulative billing, then charges 0.75% overage. The Performance plan is $599 per month with an annual commitment, and Enterprise is custom.

4. Lago: Best open-source Orb alternative

Lago is an open-source usage-based billing and metering platform backed by Y Combinator. Its core is published under the AGPLv3 license, so engineering teams can read the code, self-host it, and adapt it to their own infrastructure.

That makes Lago the clearest alternative for teams whose main worry about Orb's acquisition is control. If you want billing to run in your own environment, Lago gives you that, but your team takes on the operational responsibility. For a closer look, see our guide to Lago alternatives.

Key features:

• Open-source billing engine: Event ingestion, billable metrics, plans, and invoicing are all available in the free self-hosted edition
• Flexible pricing models: Pay-as-you-go, subscription plus usage overages, tiered and volume pricing, and multi-dimensional pricing via metric filters
• Lago Premium: A commercial package, available in the cloud or self-hosted, that adds features such as customer portals, prepaid credits, entitlements, multiple billing entities, access controls, and audit trails

Pros:

• Self-hosting gives you full control over where billing data lives
• Open code is auditable, which matters for financial calculations
• There's no revenue share on the open-source edition

Cons:

• Your engineering team owns hosting, upgrades, and uptime for the self-hosted version
• Many features finance teams need, like customer portals and credits, sit behind the paid Premium tier
• There's no native CPQ or contract workflow for sales-led deals

Best for:

• Developer-first companies that want to avoid vendor lock-in
• Teams with strict data residency or infrastructure requirements

Pricing: The open-source edition is free. Lago Premium is quote-only and available with cloud or self-hosted deployment.

5. Metronome: Best for high-volume infrastructure companies in the Stripe ecosystem

Metronome is a usage-based billing platform built for large-scale SaaS, infrastructure, and AI companies that process massive event volumes and negotiate complex contracts. It's often seen as the enterprise-grade option among usage-first tools.

Metronome is now part of Stripe. It still sells standalone with its own pricing, and it also powers advanced usage billing inside Stripe Billing. That's appealing if you're already committed to Stripe, and a consideration if you're not. Our roundup of Metronome competitors covers options that are easier to get started with.

Key features:

• High-throughput usage ingestion: Built to process very large event volumes reliably, which suits monitoring, communications, and AI infrastructure products
• Contract and commitment support: Customer-specific pricing, commits, and credits for complex enterprise deals
• Data warehouse sync and alerts: Near real-time sync to warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery, plus usage alerts for internal teams and customers

Pros:

• Proven at very high usage volumes
• Handles complex enterprise contract structures well
• Native connection to Stripe's payments infrastructure

Cons:

• It isn't a CPQ or CRM, so sales-led teams still need separate quoting tools
• Setup and changes often require developers or technical consultants
• Ownership by Stripe makes it a less neutral choice for companies using other processors

Best for:

• Infrastructure, database, and AI companies with very large consumption-based revenue
• Late-stage companies already standardized on Stripe

Pricing: Metronome offers a free Starter tier, with custom pricing for larger contracts.

6. m3ter: Best for Salesforce-centric companies with multiple usage dimensions

m3ter (pronounced "meter") is a UK-founded metering and rating platform that helps B2B software companies implement and iterate on usage-based pricing. It acts as a middle layer that automates metering, rating, and bill calculation.

Salesforce completed its acquisition of m3ter on July 1, 2026, and is bringing it into Agentforce Revenue Management. That makes m3ter a natural fit for Salesforce-heavy organizations, and a less obvious one for everyone else.

Key features:

• Automated metering and data integrity: Ingests usage from multiple sources and flags formatting errors or duplicates before they reach an invoice
• Real-time bill calculation: Running totals let you and your customers see charges accrue mid-cycle
• CRM and ERP connectivity: Connectors for Salesforce and NetSuite, plus an open API

Pros:

• Pricing changes can be configured and tested quickly
• Strong fit with Salesforce's ecosystem now that it's part of Salesforce
• Handles products with many usage dimensions well

Cons:

• It isn't a full subscription management suite, so seat licenses and dunning may need other tools
• It isn't a finance platform, so revenue recognition and reporting sit elsewhere
• Implementations are complex and can take months

Best for:

• Growth-stage and enterprise B2B SaaS companies running on Salesforce
• Products with several usage dimensions that need flexible rating

Pricing: Custom, typically a platform fee plus usage-based components.

7. Amberflo: Best developer-first metering for pay-as-you-go products

Amberflo is a metering and billing platform built by former AWS engineers. It captures usage data at scale and powers flexible pricing plans on top of it, similar to the way cloud providers bill for consumption.

Amberflo has expanded its focus toward AI products, with support for credits, prepaid wallets, and outcome-based pricing. It remains a developer-first tool rather than a full revenue platform.

Key features:

• Real-time usage metering: Ingest events through APIs or SDKs, and Amberflo records and aggregates them as they arrive
• Usage-based pricing models: Per-unit, tiered, volume, credit-based, minimum-commit, and multi-dimensional pricing
• Usage analytics: Dashboards that show how each customer consumes your product, down to individual meters

Pros:

• Purpose-built for granular usage-based monetization
• New pricing dimensions can be launched by adding a meter
• Designed to process large event volumes quickly

Cons:

• It doesn't cover the full subscription lifecycle, quoting, or CRM workflows
• Engineering effort is needed to instrument your product and integrate the APIs
• Costs rise with event volume, so model them carefully before committing

Best for:

• Product-led companies built around pay-as-you-go pricing
• API, AI, and infrastructure providers where every unit of usage is billable

Pricing: A startup tier is listed from about $99 per month, and Growth starts at $599 per month, with additional fees based on billing volume and meter events.

8. Maxio: Best for revenue recognition

Maxio is a subscription billing and financial operations platform formed by the 2021 merger of Chargify and SaaSOptics, and it later acquired RevOps. It combines Chargify's billing with SaaSOptics' revenue recognition and SaaS analytics.

Maxio can be powerful for finance teams, but it's the product of several companies brought together, and some customers describe the experience as disjointed.

Key features:

• Subscription and billing management: Flat-rate, tiered, and usage add-on billing, proration, discounts, trials, and multi-year contract terms
• SaaS metrics and analytics: MRR movements, bookings, billings, cash collections, and cohort analysis
• Revenue recognition and GAAP reporting: Automated revenue schedules and financial reporting, inherited from SaaSOptics

Pros:

• Billing, metrics, and financial reporting live in one platform
• Reports and terminology are designed for CFOs and controllers
• Automated revenue schedules can speed up the month-end close

Cons:

• Implementations are complex and can take up to a year
• The merged-product heritage can make workflows feel disjointed
• Some users report slow support on complex billing issues
• Usage billing is an add-on to a subscription core, not a native strength

Best for:

• B2B SaaS companies that need financial-grade billing and reporting
• Companies with a dedicated finance team that owns the billing system

Pricing: The Grow plan is $599 per month for up to $100K in monthly billings. Scale is quote-only for higher volumes.

9. Zuora: Best for large enterprises with complex billing

Zuora is one of the original subscription billing platforms. Founded in 2007, it championed the "subscription economy" and was taken private by Silver Lake and GIC in 2025.

Zuora is designed for very complex billing scenarios and high volumes at large enterprises. But it was built well before the age of AI monetization, and it relies on acquisitions, such as Togai in 2024, to strengthen its usage billing.

Key features:

• Usage charge models: Flat fees, per-unit, tiered, overage, prepaid drawdown, and committed usage, with additional metering capabilities from Togai
• Workflow and customization: A workflow engine for automating business processes, plus APIs and platform tools for custom behavior
• Compliance and ecosystem: PCI Level 1 compliance, detailed audit trails, revenue recognition through Zuora Revenue, and a large network of implementation partners

Pros:

• Proven at the scale of millions of subscribers
• Strong compliance, audit, and access controls for enterprise requirements
• A large community of consultants and certified admins

Cons:

• Implementations resemble an ERP project and can take more than a year
• Many companies need dedicated admins or consultants to run it
• The interface is designed for operations specialists, not self-service
• Total cost of ownership is among the highest in the category

Best for:

• Large enterprises with complex billing and the resources to manage an enterprise system
• Telecommunications, media, IoT, and large-scale cloud businesses

Pricing: Quote-only. Third-party estimates put entry contracts in the tens of thousands of dollars per year, before implementation and integration fees.

Frequently asked questions

What is Orb used for?
Orb is a usage-based billing platform. It ingests product usage events, turns them into billable metrics, applies pricing rules, and generates invoices. It's mostly used by AI, infrastructure, and developer-tool companies that bill on consumption.

Is Orb still an independent company?
No. Adyen agreed to acquire Orb for $335 million in June 2026, and the deal closed in early July 2026. Orb now operates as an Adyen subsidiary under an incubator model, and Adyen has said it will continue to support customers who use other payment providers.

How much does Orb cost?
Orb doesn't publish prices. Its Core, Advanced, and Enterprise tiers are all custom-priced, based mainly on billing volume and usage-event volume, with an added platform fee on Advanced and Enterprise.

What is the best alternative to Orb?
For most B2B SaaS and AI companies, Alguna is the strongest Orb alternative because it combines usage metering with CPQ, contracts, collections, and revenue recognition, at a flat, published price. Lago suits teams that want open-source self-hosting, and Metronome suits high-volume companies already committed to Stripe.

Does Orb include CPQ?
Orb focuses on metering, pricing, and invoicing and relies on CRM integrations for quoting. If your sales team needs quotes, approvals, and e-signatures that flow directly into billing, look for a platform with native CPQ, such as Alguna.

Is there an open-source alternative to Orb?
Yes. Lago is the best-known open-source alternative. Its core is available under the AGPLv3 license for self-hosting, with a paid Premium package for advanced features and support.

What happened to Metronome and m3ter?
Both were acquired in 2026. Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome in January 2026, and Salesforce completed its acquisition of m3ter on July 1, 2026.

How hard is it to migrate off Orb?
It depends on how many plans, contracts, and customers you have and how much historical usage you need to bring across. The safest approach is to export customers, subscriptions, and usage history, rebuild your pricing in the new platform, and run both systems in parallel for at least one billing cycle before cutting over. Ask each vendor whether migration support is included.

Choose a billing platform built for where you're going (not where Orb is going)

Every company's revenue workflow looks different. If you're an early-stage startup on simple subscriptions, Stripe Billing can get you live quickly. Chargebee and Maxio bring order to subscriptions and finance reporting as you grow. Lago, Metronome, m3ter, and Amberflo give engineering-led teams deep usage billing, and Zuora still serves the largest enterprises, at a price.

What stands out this year is the trade-off between flexibility, cost, complexity, and now independence. With Orb, Metronome, and m3ter all owned by payments and CRM companies, the billing layer is becoming part of someone else's platform strategy. Most tools also excel at one part of the revenue workflow but leave you to stitch the rest together.

Alguna takes a different approach. It gives founders, CFOs, and RevOps teams one independent system for pricing, quoting, usage billing, invoicing, collections, and revenue recognition, with flat pricing and no engineering bottleneck. If you want to unify your revenue workflows while staying flexible, Alguna is the Orb alternative that scales with you.