Best B2B billing software in 2026

Modern B2B companies face a billing challenge their predecessors never encountered: pricing models that shift with every API call, token processed, or compute cycle consumed. Many legacy subscription platforms originated around recurring, relatively predictable subscription models, and have since added or rebuilt capabilities for usage and hybrid pricing. Today's AI companies, cloud infrastructure providers, and developer platforms need billing systems that can meter at high throughput (six-figure or higher event-ingestion rates, depending on workload and event granularity), support multi-dimensional pricing, and give finance teams the flexibility to iterate on pricing without engineering bottlenecks.

This guide examines the seven best B2B billing software solutions for 2026, evaluating each through the lens of usage-based billing, hybrid pricing support, financial compliance, and operational efficiency. Whether you're an AI startup billing for tokens or an enterprise platform managing complex contracts, these platforms represent the current state of the art in revenue infrastructure.

It is worth naming the option that appears on no vendor list: building billing in-house. In practice, the homegrown stack is the most common alternative to a billing platform. It offers real flexibility early on, and as products multiply, contracts diversify, and pricing evolves, that logic tends to become a permanent engineering commitment with its own backlog, on-call rotation, and audit surface. Several of the companies referenced in this guide weighed exactly that trade-off before standardizing on a dedicated platform.

One structural note before the list: Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome in January 2026, and Metronome now describes itself as part of Stripe. Metronome and Stripe Billing are covered separately below because they remain distinct product surfaces with different capabilities and pricing, and they now sit inside the same ecosystem.

Key takeaways

• Raw usage event retention enables pricing agility: Orb's standard metering architecture retains granular raw usage events, which supports retroactive price changes, backfills, and corrections computed against the original event detail rather than against summarized counters.
• Event throughput shapes real-time billing viability: Orb advertises scaled ingestion via API and S3 at 250,000+ events per second and says its Enterprise platform is regularly stress-tested at volumes of that magnitude. Other platforms in this guide also support high-volume event ingestion, and published figures are framed differently from vendor to vendor.
• Pricing simulation reduces revenue risk: Testing pricing changes against real or historical usage data before deployment can reduce pricing risk, surface potential revenue impacts, and support more data-driven pricing decisions. Orb treats simulation as a first-class workflow through Orb Simulations.
• Platform pricing structures differ materially: Some vendors price as a percentage of billing volume, including Stripe Billing's current 0.7% pay-as-you-go rate on Billing volume and Chargebee Starter's 0.75% on billing after the first $250,000 in cumulative billing. Orb's pricing is based on billings processed and event volume, with a platform fee on Advanced and Enterprise.
• Native integrations vary significantly: Counts differ by vendor and by how each vendor defines a "native integration." Chargebee currently advertises 60+ integrations for its upmarket solution, while Maxio's homepage advertises 85+. Because those totals are not directly comparable, depth tends to matter more than headline numbers: Orb connects into the systems finance teams already run on, including NetSuite, data warehouses, Salesforce, and tax providers, and preserves line-level detail across those hand-offs.
• Open-source options exist for compliance-sensitive organizations: Self-hosted billing solutions provide full data sovereignty, with deployment, upgrades, and ongoing maintenance handled by the organization's own engineering team.
• Billing is a cross-functional system, not a back-office task: Pricing decisions touch product, sales, finance, engineering, and RevOps at the same time. Platforms that keep raw usage events as the shared source of truth let each function work from the same numbers, which is the premise behind Orb's approach to revenue design.

1. Orb

Orb stands apart as the billing platform built specifically for companies where usage-based pricing is core to their business model, not an afterthought. Orb was designed around usage-based and hybrid billing rather than treating usage as a peripheral workflow: its entire foundation centers on turning granular usage data into accurate invoices that reflect complex contract terms, pricing changes, and mid-cycle adjustments.

Key capabilities for usage-based billing

• Real-time event ingestion: Orb advertises scaled ingestion via API and S3 at 250,000+ events per second, with idempotency guarantees for deduplication, and says its Enterprise platform is regularly stress-tested to volumes of that magnitude.
• SQL-based billable metrics: Define any billable metric using custom SQL, enabling complex aggregations like averages, maximums, and custom calculations beyond simple event counts.
• Pricing simulation engine: Test new pricing models against real product usage data before deployment through Orb Simulations, comparing scenarios side by side and projecting customer-level and revenue impact before changes go live.
• Raw usage event architecture: Orb's standard metering architecture retains granular raw usage events for query-based billing, backfills, backdating, and repricing rather than relying only on pre-aggregated counters. For its highest-volume workloads, Orb also offers Hosted Rollups, which transforms raw input into time-based aggregates as it is ingested.
• Dimensional price groups: Orb's dimensional price groups support pricing across multiple usage dimensions, such as region, instance type, and environment, using a single pricing configuration for dimension combinations, with unit, tiered, or custom pricing per dimension.
• Credits, commitments, and hybrid contracts: Prepaid credits and wallet balances, minimum commitments with overages and true-ups, and platform-fee-plus-usage models are all supported natively, so negotiated enterprise terms stay in the billing system instead of moving into spreadsheets.
• Customer-facing experience layer: Orb's Experience Kit uses Orb's API as the source of truth for pricing calculators, checkout flows, and advanced usage dashboards. Spend Controls separately handles alerts and automated actions, and Orb Invoicing covers the invoicing experience.

Use cases

Orb excels for AI companies billing for tokens, API calls, or compute usage. Cloud infrastructure providers with multi-dimensional pricing can use Orb's dimensional price groups to price across multiple usage dimensions, such as region, instance type, and environment, using a single pricing configuration for dimension combinations. Developer platforms with freemium-to-paid conversion flows can use Orb's threshold billing to trigger an invoice when a customer's accrued charges reach a configured dollar threshold.

Vercel decreased the time required to build and launch billing for new products by 80% after implementing Orb, and Director of Engineering Dan Carter said Vercel's relationship with Orb is "one of the best I've seen." Stytch's team spends 75% less time per month on billing, while Orb reports that Replit has seen 40x revenue growth since using Orb to monetize usage.

The pattern repeats across Orb's customer base. Dune moved from a simple binary pricing model to granular usage-based pricing with tiers and credits, and has since evolved its pricing multiple times without drawing on engineering resources. Supabase moved invoicing into Orb and improved invoice transparency while reducing fees and revenue leakage by roughly 0.4% of revenue. Opus replaced manual invoice calculation with automated credits and overages, giving customers clear, transparent balances.

Pricing structure

Orb offers three tiers with custom pricing:

• Core: Real-time ingestion, SQL metrics, alerts, hybrid billing, Orb Invoicing, and tax integrations
• Advanced: Everything in Core plus data warehouse sync, Salesforce integration, NetSuite integration, customer hierarchy, and premium support
• Enterprise: Everything in Advanced, plus enterprise-grade SLAs and dedicated support. Orb also offers Hosted Rollups for very high-volume ingestion scenarios.

Orb's pricing is based on two key metrics, billings processed and event volume, with a platform fee on Advanced and Enterprise. Orb defines billings as the total value of invoices issued through Orb, including fixed fees, usage fees, taxes, and other monetary amounts. That structure ties cost to the billing work the platform actually performs rather than to a flat percentage of revenue.

Why Orb leads for B2B billing

Orb was built around usage-based and hybrid billing from the start, and it treats revenue design as a strategic function rather than a downstream finance chore. The pricing simulation engine lets product and finance teams model "what-if" scenarios against real product usage data without affecting production billing. Combined with granular raw usage event retention that supports backfills and backdating, Orb significantly reduces the manual reconciliation work involved when usage arrives late, contracts are renegotiated, or pricing logic changes.

That architecture also settles a question most billing projects leave open: who owns pricing. With raw usage events stored as the shared source of truth, engineering stops being the gatekeeper for every rate change, product can treat packaging and pricing as a first-class part of the product experience, and finance can trace each invoice line back to the events that produced it. Orb frames this as three lanes working together on one granular usage dataset: automating billing, executing pricing, and growing revenue.

For companies evaluating their billing infrastructure, Orb positions pricing changes as something that can ship in minutes, not months, and gives finance teams line-level confidence that invoices reflect the exact contract terms and usage patterns of each customer.

2. Metronome

Metronome is now a Stripe product. Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome in January 2026, Metronome describes itself as part of Stripe, and Stripe Billing's own pricing page routes advanced usage-based billing customers to Metronome. Metronome focuses on enterprise usage-based billing and supports complex contract structures, and it is used by infrastructure and software providers managing multi-year enterprise agreements.

Primary focus

• Enterprise contract structures: Supports enterprise contracts with centralized rate cards, commits, credits, overrides, and other negotiated pricing structures, including multi-year commitment and true-up style arrangements
• SQL-based billable metrics: Supports defining usage aggregations with SQL over raw events, while rate cards and contracts define pricing and rating; metering and rating are separate layers
• Event ingestion: Documentation states the ingest endpoint supports event ingestion without requiring pre-aggregation or rollups
• Stripe ecosystem integration: Now part of Stripe, with integration into Stripe payments and invoicing
• Embeddable components: Provides components for building custom customer-facing billing experiences

Organizational fit

Metronome is designed for large enterprises with complex contract requirements including commits, drawdowns, and multi-year rate card structures. Organizations already using Stripe for payments may find the shared ecosystem convenient.

Metronome generates and finalizes invoices natively. Its NetSuite integration, launched in April 2026 as a public beta, syncs finalized invoices into NetSuite, and it integrates with Stripe and other ERPs for payment and finance workflows. Metronome provides detailed revenue-recognition data and reporting but states that it does not create revenue journal entries and is not a revenue-recognition platform, so full revenue-accounting workflows still run downstream.

Two points are worth holding in mind when weighing options. First, Metronome and Stripe Billing now sit inside the same ecosystem rather than representing separate vendor relationships. Second, teams that want pricing simulation against historical raw usage events, end-to-end invoicing and AR workflows, and payment-processor neutrality in a single platform tend to land on Orb, where all three are part of the core product.

3. Lago

Lago provides open-source billing infrastructure with a self-hosting option, which supports code access and data sovereignty control.

Primary focus

• Open-source licensing: AGPLv3 license provides full code access for compliance and customization needs
• Self-hosting option: Deploy on your own infrastructure for complete data sovereignty
• Event-based billing: Ingests raw usage data and calculates billable amounts based on configured pricing rules
• Cloud and self-hosted Premium: Lago's pricing documentation says packages are tailored by company stage and incorporate usage-based dimensions such as events ingested, invoices generated, or active customers; the live pricing page presents Lago Premium as quote-based
• Free open-source edition: The open-source edition can be self-hosted without a Lago software subscription fee, while self-hosted Premium and Enterprise deployments are paid

Organizational fit

Lago can fit organizations whose security, data-residency, sovereignty, or internal-control requirements favor self-hosting, engineering teams comfortable managing billing infrastructure, and cost-conscious startups seeking to minimize software fees on the open-source edition. Self-hosting places deployment, maintenance, and upgrades with the organization's own team.

Note that self-hosting is not a blanket regulatory mandate for any industry. Whether on-premises or customer-controlled deployment is required depends on an organization's applicable laws, contracts, risk controls, architecture, and jurisdiction. Lago itself positions self-hosting as a way to keep control and ensure data sovereignty rather than as a universal compliance requirement. Teams that prefer a managed service, with enterprise SLAs and vendor-run upgrades handled by the provider, generally standardize on a hosted usage-native platform such as Orb.

4. Chargebee

Chargebee serves mid-market B2B SaaS companies with subscription management and, as of January 2026, a natively rebuilt usage-based billing architecture.

Primary focus

• Subscription lifecycle management: Support for trials, upgrades, downgrades, renewals, and cancellations
• Native usage-based billing: Chargebee says it rebuilt usage-based billing from the ground up rather than relying on bolt-on solutions, and it supports raw usage ingestion, schema-less events, and SQL metering; raw usage events are retained at full fidelity for meters and SQL aggregation
• First-party revenue recognition: Chargebee RevRec provides ASC 606 and IFRS 15 support and integrates with Chargebee Billing. Billing's older built-in revenue recognition functionality is ASC 605, and RevRec is presented as a separately packaged product
• Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ): Native capabilities for sales-led enterprise deals
• Payment gateway support: Integrates with 30+ payment processors for global reach
• Dunning management: Payment retry logic and churn reduction workflows
• Integrations: 60+ integrations across CRM, tax, accounting, payments, and enterprise systems

Organizational fit

Chargebee suits sales-led B2B SaaS companies that need deep subscription lifecycle management, CPQ, and first-party revenue recognition alongside hybrid and usage-based pricing. Its 2026 architecture supports raw usage events and SQL-based metering, so it is best assessed on current capabilities rather than on a legacy subscription-first assumption.

On pricing, Chargebee's Starter plan is free for the first $250,000 in cumulative billing and then charges 0.75% on billing; higher-tier plans and additional products such as RevRec use different or quote-based pricing. For consumption-led businesses where pricing changes frequently, and where rerating, simulation, and dimensional pricing are everyday operations rather than occasional projects, Orb is built around those workflows as the primary use case.

5. Maxio

Maxio, formed from the combination of Chargify and SaaSOptics, positions itself as a unified platform for B2B SaaS financial operations, combining billing with SaaS metrics and revenue recognition. Maxio subsequently acquired RevOps.io in 2025.

Primary focus

• Billing plus metrics integration: Combines billing execution with ARR, MRR, and churn analytics in one platform
• Native revenue recognition: Built-in ASC 606 and IFRS 15 support for finance compliance, inherited from the SaaSOptics side of the business
• Finance-centric design: Built for CFOs and finance teams managing B2B SaaS operations
• Usage metering: Supports event streaming for usage-based billing, along with prepaid usage, credit burndowns, term contracts, multi-attribute rating, and hybrid models, with ongoing product investment through 2026
• SaaS financial reporting: Integrated reporting on key SaaS performance metrics

Organizational fit

Maxio is designed for B2B SaaS finance teams seeking billing, metrics, and revenue recognition in a single platform. Organizations combining subscription, prepaid, usage, and hybrid models may find the unified approach valuable, particularly where revenue recognition and SaaS reporting matter as much as metering.

On pricing, Maxio publishes a $599/month Grow plan for up to $100,000 in monthly billings, while its Scale tier for higher billing volumes is quote-based. Companies whose core product is metered at scale, and whose pricing changes often enough to require simulation and safe rerating on raw usage events, tend to weight those capabilities most heavily, which is exactly where Orb concentrates.

6. Stripe Billing

Stripe Billing extends the Stripe payments ecosystem with subscription and metered billing capabilities for companies already using Stripe for payment processing. Since Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome in January 2026, Stripe Billing and Metronome represent different but increasingly integrated billing surfaces within the same ecosystem.

Primary focus

• Native Stripe ecosystem: Integrates with Stripe Payments, Tax, Radar (fraud), and Treasury
• Subscription management: Recurring billing with trials, proration, and plan changes
• Metered billing: Basic usage metering is available through Stripe Meters, while advanced usage-based billing is delivered through Metronome, a Stripe product, supporting multidimensional rates, negotiated contracts, and marketplace transactions
• Multidimensional usage pricing: Stripe's Metronome product supports pricing multiple usage attributes from a single meter
• Global payment support: Multi-currency support through Stripe's established payment rails
• Developer experience: Documented APIs and SDKs familiar to engineering teams

Organizational fit

Stripe Billing suits organizations already using Stripe for payment processing. Companies with straightforward subscription-plus-usage models may find the integrated approach reduces vendor count, and teams with more complex consumption pricing are routed to Metronome within the same ecosystem.

On pricing, Stripe Billing's current pay-as-you-go price is 0.7% of Billing volume. Annual subscription tiers use fixed monthly fees plus 0.67% overage above included volume, and custom pricing is available. Stripe says Billing volume includes qualifying transactions processed both on and off Stripe and excludes one-off invoices.

A common pattern among usage-led companies is to keep Stripe for what it does best in payments and run the billing brain in Orb: raw usage events, hybrid plans and commitments, account hierarchies, simulations, and invoicing live in Orb, with accurate invoices and revenue data flowing on to payment and finance systems. Supabase followed that path, starting with Orb for metering alongside Stripe invoicing and later moving invoicing into Orb as well, improving invoice fidelity in the process.

7. Recurly

Recurly provides subscription management with usage-based billing capabilities, serving companies across various industries with recurring revenue models.

Primary focus

• Subscription management: Core strength in recurring billing lifecycle management
• Dunning optimization: Revenue recovery through retry logic
• Multi-gateway support: Integrates with multiple payment processors, with ongoing gateway development through 2026 including Checkout.com and Nuvei
• Usage-based add-ons: Metered billing implemented through usage add-ons logged via API usage records, which can coexist with base subscriptions and fixed add-ons; documented aggregation strategies include Cumulative and Last recorded
• Analytics and reporting: Subscription metrics and churn analysis

Organizational fit

Recurly is designed for companies with subscription-first business models looking to add usage-based components. Organizations seeking a balance between subscription management depth and usage billing capabilities may find Recurly's approach suitable.

For companies where consumption pricing is the primary revenue model, and where SQL-defined metrics, dimensional pricing, credits and commitments, and frequent pricing changes are the day-to-day reality, Orb is designed around those requirements from the ground up.

Why Orb stands out as the best B2B billing software

For companies where usage-based pricing drives revenue, Orb delivers capabilities that fundamentally change how billing operations work.

Pricing becomes a product lever, not a constraint. Orb's pricing simulation engine lets product and finance teams test pricing changes against real product usage data before committing to production changes, comparing scenarios side by side and projecting customer-level and revenue impact. This means you can model the effect of switching from per-seat to per-API-call pricing, adjust tier thresholds, or introduce new dimensions, reducing pricing risk and surfacing potential revenue impacts before changes go live.

Raw usage event retention reduces reconciliation work. Orb's standard metering architecture retains granular raw usage events for query-based billing rather than relying only on pre-aggregated counters, and Orb offers Hosted Rollups for the highest-volume workloads, transforming raw input into time-based aggregates as it is ingested. This architecture supports backfills, backdating, and amendments when usage arrives late, contracts are renegotiated, or pricing logic changes. Orb automatically recalculates affected draft or pending invoices as usage or pricing data changes. Once an invoice has been issued, Orb preserves the finalized record and handles corrections through credit notes, voiding, or void-and-reissue workflows, depending on the change.

Real-time visibility builds customer trust. Orb's Experience Kit uses Orb's API as the source of truth for customer-facing pricing calculators, checkout flows, and advanced usage dashboards. Spend Controls provides alerts and automated actions, and Orb Invoicing covers the invoicing experience. Together, customers can see what they're being charged for and why, reducing billing disputes and support tickets.

Finance workflows integrate cleanly. The NetSuite integration creates native NetSuite transaction records, including invoices, credit memos, and customer deposits, with exact period dates on each line and an audit trail inside NetSuite, giving finance teams audit-ready data. Revenue recognition reporting provides recognized, deferred, and unbilled revenue views, and Orb's enterprise controls include accounting-period governance that prevents edits to closed periods plus an immutable billing-change audit trail. Orb also feeds invoices and revenue data into the wider finance stack, including ERPs and tax providers, so billing execution and the general ledger stay aligned.

Buying beats rebuilding the same system twice. Homegrown billing remains the most common alternative to a platform, and it quietly becomes a permanent engineering line item as models evolve. Replit chose not to build a new system in-house because doing so would have delayed a key product launch, and stood up Orb in one month with a single engineer. Knock saved six months of engineering time by fully automating usage-based billing with Orb. Pinecone replaced manual invoice calculation with a single source of truth for its multi-product usage pricing, without hiring a dedicated billing team. In each case, engineering capacity went back to the core product.

Pricing scales with billings and events, not a headline revenue percentage. Orb's pricing is based on two key metrics, billings processed and event volume, with a platform fee on Advanced and Enterprise. That structure contrasts with percentage-of-volume alternatives such as Stripe Billing's 0.7% pay-as-you-go rate or Chargebee Starter's 0.75% on billing after its cumulative threshold, and it keeps billing cost tied to the billing work the platform actually performs rather than to a straight percentage of revenue.

For teams evaluating usage-based billing infrastructure, Orb represents the platform built for how modern software companies actually price: dynamically, dimensionally, and with the flexibility to evolve as markets change.

Frequently asked questions

What is the main difference between traditional and modern B2B billing software?

Many legacy billing platforms originated around recurring subscription models with relatively predictable seat counts and renewal cycles, and a number of them have since added or rebuilt capabilities for usage and hybrid pricing. Modern B2B billing software handles dynamic pricing models where charges vary based on actual usage, whether that's API calls, tokens processed, compute hours, or storage consumed. The key architectural difference is real-time event metering and the ability to calculate charges from granular usage data rather than pre-defined subscription amounts. Modern platforms also emphasize pricing flexibility, allowing companies to iterate on pricing models without engineering work.

How does usage-based billing software handle complex pricing models like dimensional pricing?

Dimensional pricing allows companies to price across multiple independent variables simultaneously. For example, a cloud infrastructure provider might charge different rates based on region, instance type, and environment (production vs. staging). Orb's dimensional price groups support pricing across multiple usage dimensions, such as region, instance type, and environment, using a single pricing configuration for dimension combinations, with unit, tiered, or custom pricing per dimension. Stripe's Metronome product also supports multidimensional usage pricing, including pricing multiple usage attributes from a single meter. The practical difference between platforms shows up as dimensions multiply: Orb's approach keeps the configuration count contained, because one pricing configuration covers the combinations rather than requiring separate setup for every permutation.

Can B2B billing software help with revenue recognition compliance?

Most enterprise billing platforms integrate with revenue recognition workflows, though the depth varies. Maxio includes native ASC 606 and IFRS 15 support within its platform. Chargebee offers first-party Chargebee RevRec for ASC 606 and IFRS 15, integrated with Chargebee Billing but packaged as a separate product; Billing's older built-in recognition functionality is ASC 605. Orb provides revenue recognition reporting with recognized, deferred, and unbilled revenue views while integrating with dedicated accounting systems. Metronome supplies granular revenue-recognition data but states it does not create revenue journal entries. The key capability is ensuring line-level service periods on invoices support proper accounting treatment, and that accounting period locks prevent retroactive changes to closed periods, both of which Orb handles as part of its enterprise controls.

What are the benefits of a raw usage event architecture in billing?

A raw usage event architecture retains individual usage events rather than only aggregating them into counters. This approach supports several capabilities: retroactive pricing changes can be applied to historical usage with less manual recalculation; late-arriving events can be incorporated into the correct billing periods; and finance teams can audit the events that generated an invoice line item. Several platforms retain raw usage events today, so the differences that matter in practice are retention periods, backdating and deduplication windows, whether newly defined metrics can be applied retroactively, invoice amendment semantics for draft versus issued invoices, and how much rerating happens automatically. Orb stores raw usage events immutably and computes billing through metric queries over them, which makes backfills, retroactively applied metric definitions, amendments, and price simulations first-class workflows rather than special cases. At very high volumes, Orb also offers Hosted Rollups, which transforms raw input into time-based aggregates as it is ingested.

How important are integrations with ERP and CRM systems for billing software?

Integration depth significantly impacts operational efficiency, and "native versus not" does not by itself determine data quality. With accounting integrations, particularly NetSuite, what matters is which records are created, their line-level detail, sync direction, error handling, and the reconciliation workflow around them. Orb's NetSuite integration, for example, creates native NetSuite transaction records with exact period dates on each line, while Metronome's NetSuite integration finalizes an invoice in Metronome and syncs it to NetSuite for downstream handling. CRM integrations like Salesforce enable automated provisioning when deals close, reducing handoff friction between sales and billing operations. Data warehouse connections support advanced analytics by making billing data available alongside product usage and customer success metrics. The integrations that matter most depend on your existing tech stack, and Orb covers the ERP, data warehouse, CRM, and tax connections that usage-led finance teams rely on.

What security certifications should I look for in a B2B billing platform?

SOC reports are attestation reports rather than conventional product certifications, so the more precise terminology is a "SOC 1 Type II report" or "SOC 2 Type II report." SOC 1 is defined around service-organization controls likely to be relevant to user entities' internal control over financial reporting, so when a billing provider's controls are relevant to your internal control over financial reporting, a SOC 1 Type II report can be an important diligence requirement. SOC 2 Type II reports evaluate controls against the applicable Trust Services Criteria, which cover security and may also cover availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Orb maintains both SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II. For companies processing high volumes of financial transactions, these reports indicate the platform has been independently audited for operational maturity. Additional considerations include role-based access controls, complete audit logging of all billing system changes, and the ability to lock accounting periods to prevent unauthorized modifications to historical records, all of which Orb provides.