Make price changes easily with Versions and Migrations

Alvaro Morales

Price changes are important for your company, but they are challenging to execute. Last year, many software companies changed how they price their product in response to inflation, higher interest rates, product innovation, and general customer feedback. In 2024, this trend is not slowing down one bit. With the explosion of AI and continued macro pressure against seat-based pricing, it’s now more urgent for companies to successfully evolve their pricing strategy.

Pricing is not static—it needs to be constantly adjusted and optimized to reflect the changing needs and preferences of your customers, as well as the evolving features and value of your product. That’s why we built Versions and Migrations, the first-ever feature to run price changes efficiently, with granular control over which customers should be affected. Ditch the spreadsheet and one-off scripts, and ship your next price change with Orb.

Orb’s latest Versions and Migrations feature is perfect for us. I easily migrated tens of thousands of customers across a handful of plans in a matter of minutes while using it, and know it'll save us hours of time and many headaches in the future.”
‍_{- Kevin Hedrick, Head of Biz Ops at}_Stytch

Price changes are hard today

Here’s a potential set of questions that may cross your mind while implementing a price change:

Is the plan that I need to migrate “Pro V3-new” or “Pro V3-bugfix”?
How do we account for customers still on legacy pricing or with custom contracts?
If the change needs to go live tomorrow, I have to wait until 11:59 pm tonight before running the script

If you’ve ever implemented a price change (or put one off because you know how high effort and error-prone they are), this line of thinking probably resonates with you.

Despite how difficult these changes are, not changing your pricing is still a worse choice.

Enter Versions and Migrations

With today’s launch, Orb is the first billing solution that comes out of the box with tools to run a price change with unmatched control and flexibility.

With plan versions, you can:

Maintain different versions of pricing: Never change pricing on customers by accident. Create new versions of a plan when you make a change. Mark a version as default so that all new subscriptions in the webapp or API get created on the latest version.
‍Quickly see who is on which version: Get clear on different pricing structures and billable metrics across versions. See how many customers are on your current vs legacy pricing and drill down to see a history of changes.
‍Keep customers on legacy pricing: Honor contractual commitments and renewal cycles. Keep the right customers on old versions of pricing; price changes don’t need to be all-or-nothing.

With subscription migrations, you can:

Migrate pricing in bulk: It doesn’t matter if the price change impacts a few customers or hundreds of thousands. Just select which ones you want to move over to your new plan, and which version you want them to use. All in one simple flow.
‍Schedule price changes in advance: Set price changes to start immediately, on a future date, or at the end of a term. Orb can even automatically migrate price change dates according to a customer’s billing cycle.
‍Use webhooks to power your workflows: Orb’s webhooks make price changes powerful. Get notified when a price change occurs to trigger a customer email or update an internal system when a migration is scheduled.

All of these powerful capabilities are available in our intuitive UI. You no longer need to wait for engineering to write a script to roll out new pricing. Teams across finance, product, and RevOps can now access a powerful and easy dashboard to change pricing.

We enable your pricing to evolve

Price changes come in many flavors. Orb customers are using Versions and Migrations to:

Launch new products: Start charging for a new usage-based metric or introduce a new add-on. Schedule a migration to take effect immediately or on launch day.
Enter a new vertical or industry: Launch a market-specific package and iterate on pricing with customer feedback. Try out the new package by experimenting only with new customers, not existing ones.
Increase revenue by making pricing and packaging changes: Update price points and adjust tiering. Align value with customers to keep up with product improvements and incentivize expansion and retention.

As a fast-growing startup, iterating on pricing quickly is crucial. We’re launching new AI tools this month and Orb's new feature makes it easy for us to update our pricing without any code changes, tedious migrations, and costly manual errors.”
_{- Alon Bartur, Co-founder and CEO at}_Dopt

Before and after Versions and Migrations

New pricing can be created and rolled out much more efficiently using Orb.

Steps	Legacy billing	Orb
Maintain different versions of pricing	Use brittle naming schemes that can easily become inconsistent. Create new plans with no connection between them for every change.	With plan versions as a first-class feature, you can create a new version for every pricing update. See a detailed view of what’s changed between versions.
See who is on which pricing	Keep track of customer pricing in a spreadsheet. Remember to update it on every renewal cycle or product update.	Use Orb as the source of truth to see which customer is on which plan version, and when the most recent migration became effective.
Migrate pricing in bulk	Ask engineering to write a script, or spend hours manually updating individual customers.	In just a few clicks, any stakeholder can create a migration to upgrade as many customers as they’d like. Spot-check that the changes look correct using Orb’s subscription timeline preview.
Schedule price changes in advance	Because any edits trigger immediate changes, wait to do this until the night before. If you need to do this over rolling contract start dates, price changes can take years to complete.	Schedule migrations to take effect immediately, on a specific date, or according to a customer’s billing cycle. Orb manages the full lifecycle of the migration and provides detailed visibility into progress throughout.

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With Versions and Migrations, you have full control so that your next price change can be implemented in just a few minutes, not weeks. It’s the kind of feature that you get when you reimagine a billing system for evolution and change, not stasis.

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Let us know what you think. Explore our demo sandbox, book time with us directly, or learn more at our upcoming event with leading pricing consultancy Simon-Kucher on February 29, 2024.

posted:

February 27, 2024

Category:

What's New in Orb

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