Billing is personal. Your customers care deeply about how they're charged, when they're charged, and what they're being charged for. Get it right and you build trust. Get it wrong and even your best product can feel frustrating to use.
That's why we think so much about flexibility at Orb. Earlier this quarter, we launched invoice deferral to give you control over how each customer handles invoicing around price changes.
Today, we're taking that same principle and applying it to credits with item-scoped credits—a feature that lets you control exactly which products or features a credit block can be used for.
Why item-scoped credits matter
Credits are on the rise as one of the most popular ways to monetize AI products. But they can be tricky to navigate. While credits represent a great method for tying product usage back to the costs of using their underlying LLMs, they can feel unclear to customers if not closely mapped to an outcome.
As AI companies experiment with new pricing models and enterprise teams negotiate increasingly sophisticated contracts, it’s becoming clear that customers don't just want credits—they want transparency about where those credits go and confidence that their pricing aligns with the value they receive.
Item-scoped credits solve this by allowing you to designate exactly which products, features, or services a credit block can be applied to. This precision unlocks two critical capabilities:
For sales-led teams: Shape custom contracts with surgical precision. When landing enterprise deals, your team can now structure credit packages that map directly to specific products or usage patterns, making negotiations clearer and pricing more aligned with customer value.
For product-led companies: Drive loyalty through transparent, value-driven pricing. In a landscape where users rapidly shift their loyalty to wherever the subsidized credits and fresh features are coming from, the ability to build trust with clear, value-oriented pricing becomes a key competitive lever–not a nice to have.
Real-World Impact: Baseten's Story
The value of item-scoped credits becomes clear when you see it in action. Baseten, which helps companies deploy and scale ML models, faced a common challenge: launching multiple products simultaneously while maintaining pricing clarity for customers.
"Product velocity is critical at Baseten—and launching quickly with the right pricing is key to delivering customer value fast," says Sid Shankar, Software Engineer at Baseten. "The ability to scope credit blocks to specific products, and clearly indicate to customers which products their spend is going towards helped us get our Model API and Training products to market fast." –Sid Shanker
By scoping credits to their Model API and Training products separately, Baseten could launch with confidence that customers understood exactly what they were paying for—and which promotional credits applied where.
Flexibility as philosophy
Item-scoped credits continues a core theme in Orb's product development: flexibility drives both customer experience and speed to market.
Earlier this quarter, we launched invoice deferral, giving you control over how price changes flow through to customer invoicing. Item-scoped credits extends this philosophy to credit management, ensuring that as your pricing evolves and your product portfolio grows, your billing system keeps pace without compromise.
In the AI monetization landscape, where pricing models are still being written and customer expectations are constantly shifting, this kind of flexibility isn't just convenient—it's a competitive differentiator.
