15 top SaaS trends & opportunities for 2025 you should know

The SaaS scene is experiencing blindingly fast changes. AI-native apps, usage-based pricing, and real-time billing automation are becoming the new norm. The companies leading the future of SaaS models will be those that can adapt to these changes with precision and speed.

In this post, we’ll cover the top SaaS trends reshaping the industry, what these shifts mean for growth and revenue, and how Orb, the done-for-you billing platform, helps companies achieve pricing agility and faster growth. 

1. Usage-based pricing (UBP) becomes the default

SaaS buyers in 2025 overwhelmingly prefer pricing models tied to the value they get. According to industry reports, 59% of software vendors expect usage-based models to increase as a portion of revenue, up from 41% in 2023. IDC further reports that UBP now accounts for 42% of preferred pricing methods among SaaS buyers, surpassing traditional subscriptions.

What it means for SaaS companies 

This shift reflects a major SaaS industry trend, one that prioritizes fair, performance-based billing. But implementing UBP introduces real complexity: Tracking granular usage metrics, billing customers based on real-time consumption, managing prepaid/postpaid models, and ensuring auditability.

How Orb helps 

Orb’s raw event architecture ingests raw usage data in real time and decouples it from pricing metrics. Orb RevGraph stores product, pricing, and usage data in one environment, creating a single source of truth. This enables companies to easily define value metrics (e.g., API calls, compute hours, active users) and change pricing without engineering work. 

Teams can run simulations on historical data to experiment with pricing, reduce revenue leakage, and optimize for customer value. Orb turns UBP from a liability into a competitive advantage.

2. AI-native SaaS companies go mainstream

Generative AI is now foundational. In 2024, platforms like Salesforce, Canva, and Monday.com integrated GenAI deeply into user experiences. This trend is accelerating: The global AI software market is projected to hit $1.8 trillion by 2030, and 44% of SaaS companies now charge for AI-powered features.

What it means for SaaS companies 

AI workflows are unpredictable and data-heavy. Companies need to meter compute consumption, token usage, and memory-intensive processes. Unlike seat-based models, AI billing requires dynamic, usage-driven monetization tied to infrastructure cost.

How Orb helps 

Orb was built to support AI-native platforms. It tracks any usage metric, including token counts, model-specific usage, API call volumes, and compute metrics, and combines it with pricing logic to produce accurate billing. 

With Orb, SaaS businesses can bill for AI value delivered, experiment with pricing models (e.g., token-based billing, tiered usage for inference), and present real-time cost breakdowns to customers.

3. Revenue automation overtakes manual finance ops

SaaS revenue operations are becoming too complex for spreadsheets. With hybrid pricing models, recurring revenue, dynamic invoicing, and compliance standards like ASC 606, finance teams need automation.

The revenue automation market is expected to grow from $21.5 billion in 2024 to $42.3 billion by 2030 (CAGR of 9.7%). Companies using hybrid pricing (subscription + usage) report the highest median growth rate (21%) compared to pure-play subscription or usage models.

What it means for SaaS companies 

Relying on spreadsheets for revenue recognition, invoicing, and forecasting isn’t scalable. Errors damage trust, delay payments, and require time-consuming manual audits. In other words, modern problems require modern solutions.

How Orb helps 

Orb Reporting automates everything from revenue recognition to audit-ready exports. Finance teams get real-time dashboards, automatic attribution for credits/discounts, and consistent data across invoicing and usage. Instead of reconciling spreadsheets, SaaS teams can spend time optimizing strategy.

4. Vertical SaaS gets even deeper

One-size-fits-all SaaS models are giving way to vertical-specific solutions tailored to niche needs. Healthcare, construction, logistics, and financial services are demanding tools that reflect their workflows, compliance needs, and billing preferences. This is one of the fastest-growing SaaS industry trends.

What it means for SaaS companies 

Vertical SaaS products often require HIPAA-compliant infrastructure (healthcare), job-site telemetry billing (construction), or multi-entity invoicing (finance). These industries don’t just want flexibility — they need it.

How Orb helps 

Orb supports vertical-specific pricing and compliance with configurable billing logic and dynamic pricing models. Construction SaaS companies can bill per project, per mile, or per truck load. Healthcare platforms can implement patient-level tracking with regional compliance built in. 

Orb’s no-code billing logic and real-time metering allow vertical SaaS companies to scale without rebuilding systems from scratch.

5. PLG evolves with smarter billing

Product-led growth (PLG) is a dominant SaaS go-to-market model, but the strategy has matured. In its early days, PLG relied on freemium plans and basic usage caps. Now, PLG leaders are implementing fine-grained feature gating, account-level upgrades, and usage-based monetization pathways.

What it means for SaaS companies 

Customers expect to start for free, scale organically, and move to enterprise contracts without switching tools. Billing infrastructure must support seamless transitions from free to paid, and from usage-based tiers to negotiated pricing.

How Orb helps

Orb empowers PLG strategies with tools that support in-app upgrades, dynamic plan changes, and fair billing. Teams can define thresholds for when users should convert from free to paid, experiment with pricing tiers for feature unlocks, and enable enterprise quotes without rebuilding billing logic. 

Orb integrates directly into the user experience, making billing invisible and frictionless.

6. Embedded payments + fintech monetization rise

SaaS businesses are increasingly embedding financial services like payments, wallets, and payouts directly into their products. This unlocks new revenue streams: platforms can charge fees on transactions, offer value-added financial products, and control the end-to-end customer journey.

What it means for SaaS companies

Monetizing financial infrastructure adds intricacy. Companies must manage payment flows, calculate processing fees, ensure compliance, and reconcile financial reporting across multiple channels.

How Orb helps 

Orb supports embedded payments with a billing infrastructure designed for fintech. You can create custom line items for card processing fees, charge per-transaction markups, track payouts to sub-merchants, and manage revenue shares, all within a unified billing engine. Orb also integrates with major payment processors to streamline reporting.

7. API monetization becomes a revenue stream

As APIs become critical to product delivery, they are also becoming monetizable assets. According to multiple industry sources, over 70% of B2B SaaS platforms now offer paid APIs. Monetizing API calls, data access, and compute-intensive endpoints allows companies to expand revenue without adding headcount.

What it means for SaaS companies 

Monetizing APIs requires granular usage tracking, real-time metering, and flexible pricing models. You need to differentiate between internal, partner, and third-party usage and bill accordingly.

How Orb helps

Orb tracks every API call, payload, and endpoint with built-in support for rate limiting, usage tiers, and multi-tenant billing. Pricing strategies can include pay-per-call, volume-based discounts, freemium thresholds, and more. Orb RevGraph captures and bills for every call accurately, with full attribution to the right account.

8. Real-time customer usage visibility

Today’s SaaS buyers want transparency. With UBP and hybrid billing, customers need real-time insight into their usage and spending. Lack of visibility is a top driver of churn and support tickets.

What it means for SaaS companies

Providing end users with usage dashboards reduces billing disputes, improves trust, and helps users better manage their usage. For enterprise buyers, it also supports better budget forecasting. Which in turn means a smarter use of their resources.

How Orb helps 

Orb offers usage dashboards that pull directly from the same metering engine used for billing. Customers can view current consumption and upcoming billing thresholds in real time. This not only improves satisfaction, but it also supports expansion and retention.

9. Tiered + hybrid pricing becomes the standard

Few SaaS teams now rely solely on flat-rate pricing. Most are shifting to hybrid models that combine seats, features, and usage. This creates more flexible monetization strategies that grow with customer value.

What it means for SaaS companies

Hybrid pricing models unlock more revenue opportunities. The catch is that they require systems that can support multiple dimensions of pricing, discounting, and plan migration.

How Orb helps 

Orb allows companies to mix seat-based billing, feature-based entitlements, and usage-based overages within a single SKU. Teams can set thresholds, implement metered add-ons, and simulate the revenue impact of tier changes. Orb also supports automatic billing logic updates as users scale or shift plans.

10. Data localization, privacy, and compliance go global

SaaS companies scaling globally must navigate an increasingly fragmented regulatory environment. From GDPR in Europe to CCPA in California to HIPAA in U.S. healthcare, compliance is an absolute must. SaaS organizations are also expected to meet SOC 2, ISO 27001, and other certifications for enterprise deals.

What it means for SaaS companies 

Each region has its own legal and financial expectations, localized tax rules, invoice formatting, and data residency laws. SaaS companies that can’t quickly adapt their billing logic to match regional rules will lose business or face fines.

How Orb helps 

Orb is built to support global compliance at scale. It is SOC 1 and SOC 2 certified, and tracks all billing operations and changes to ensure auditabilityt.

11. The SaaS model enters industrial workflows

Industrial sectors, like manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, and energy, are undergoing a SaaS transformation. From IoT-powered operations to robotics and predictive maintenance, SaaS as a model is now deeply embedded in physical workflows.

What it means for SaaS companies 

Billing must track digital and physical data. Industrial SaaS firms need to monitor sensor data, machine telemetry, production volume, time-on-site, and event-based triggers. Traditional billing platforms weren’t built to meter the physical world.

How Orb helps 

Orb RevGraph can ingest machine and sensor data alongside software events. You can create billing models based on tonnage, hours of machine usage, or number of completed cycles. Orb’s flexibility allows engineering and finance teams to bill accurately and transparently for any metric in these tricky environments.

12. Dynamic invoicing gets productized

In the age of usage-based billing, the invoice becomes a part of the customer experience. SaaS customers demand invoices that show what they consumed, how pricing was applied, and how to optimize future usage.

What it means for SaaS companies 

Billing transparency improves customer trust and retention. Static PDFs and cryptic billing summaries frustrate users, generate support tickets, and delay payments. Invoices must now explain themselves.

How Orb helps 

Orb provides detailed, branded invoices with full line-item granularity and plain-language explanations. Every charge — whether it’s based on usage, a subscription component, or a discount — is fully traceable and understandable.

13. Infrastructure-as-product

In modern SaaS teams, billing, analytics, and reporting infrastructure are now part of the product’s competitive edge. Developers need extensibility. Finance teams need compliance. Customers need transparency. Treating billing infrastructure as a core product surface accelerates monetization.

What it means for SaaS companies 

Homegrown stacks are slow, costly, and brittle. Integrating pricing logic, real-time usage tracking, and revenue reporting across disparate systems creates tech debt and slows time to market.

How Orb helps 

Orb is a modular, extensible platform built to serve product, engineering, and finance. Its SQL Editor enables pricing logic changes without code. Its API supports high-volume data. And its RevGraph unifies usage, product, and pricing data to power every billing, invoicing, and reporting surface. With Orb, revenue infrastructure scales with your company. 

14. Pricing is now a growth lever rather than a set-it-and-forget-it

Top-performing SaaS companies are treating pricing like a product. According to recent data, companies that regularly test and optimize pricing see 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability. Yet many SaaS teams still avoid pricing changes because legacy billing systems make them risky and resource-intensive.

What it means for SaaS companies 

Teams need to launch, test, and iterate pricing quickly, without engineering involvement or fear of billing errors. But hardcoding pricing changes can delay releases and increase churn risk.

How Orb helps 

Orb Simulations lets teams test pricing strategies based on historical usage before launching changes. You can forecast revenue, model customer impact, and refine your approach — all without touching production code. This means pricing becomes a high-velocity growth lever instead of a bottleneck.

15. SaaS teams demand revenue infrastructure they don’t have to rebuild

As SaaS technologies grow in complexity, the cost of building and maintaining custom billing stacks becomes unsustainable. Growth-stage companies, especially those with product velocity and hybrid monetization models, need infrastructure that evolves with them.

What it means for SaaS companies 

CTOs, Heads of Product, and finance leaders want a shared system of record that reduces tech debt, improves reliability, and scales effortlessly. Time spent rebuilding billing is time not spent improving the core product.

How Orb helps 

Orb is built for scale. Its modular infrastructure and agility replaces Stripe workarounds and homegrown billing code with easy-to-use tools for pricing changes, billing, invoicing, reporting, and pricing simulation. Finance gets precision. Product teams get flexibility. Engineers get velocity. Everyone gets a single source of truth.

FAQs

What are the biggest SaaS trends in 2025?

SaaS in 2025 is defined by usage-based pricing, AI-native product design, vertical specialization, and revenue infrastructure modernization. Companies are moving away from flat pricing and rigid stacks to more dynamic, scalable models. These shifts create new SaaS opportunities and demand for flexible billing platforms.

Is usage-based pricing still growing in the SaaS industry?

Yes. Usage-based pricing continues to grow and is now preferred by a majority of SaaS buyers. It aligns pricing with customer value and supports flexible onboarding and expansion. This model is especially strong in developer tools, AI, and API-first platforms.

How is AI changing SaaS product design?

AI is becoming foundational to SaaS design, shifting from isolated features to core architecture. Products are being designed around dynamic, data-intensive workflows, like LLMs and automation triggers, that require new billing logic. As a result, metering and monetizing AI usage is now a critical capability.

What’s driving the rise of vertical SaaS?

Vertical SaaS is rising because industry-specific solutions outperform general tools in regulated markets. Sectors like healthcare, construction, and finance demand tailored workflows, compliance, and monetization models. This trend is reshaping SaaS industry strategies across segments.

Why are finance teams shifting to revenue automation?

Finance teams are replacing manual workflows with automated revenue tools to handle hybrid billing, real-time invoicing, and compliance at scale. Spreadsheets can't support complex pricing models or audit-ready reporting. Automation boosts revenue efficiency and helps keep risk low.

How can SaaS companies monetize APIs?

SaaS companies monetize APIs by charging for usage, data access, or premium endpoints using tiered or pay-per-call models. This approach turns APIs into revenue drivers instead of pure infrastructure. Accurate metering and flexible pricing logic are key to doing it well.

What is infrastructure-as-a-product in the SaaS world?

Infrastructure-as-product means treating internal systems, like billing, reporting, or analytics, as strategic components of the product experience. It enables faster launches, cleaner monetization, and better customer visibility. This shift is reshaping how SaaS teams approach operational scale.

Do all SaaS businesses need PLG billing support?

Yes. If a SaaS company offers self-serve or freemium entry points, PLG billing is vital. Supporting dynamic usage, upgrades, and user-level entitlements requires infrastructure that adapts with customer growth. Without it, monetization hits friction.

What tools help SaaS companies handle complex billing?

Modern SaaS teams rely on tools like Orb for usage metering, pricing experimentation, automated invoicing, and revenue recognition. These platforms replace brittle homegrown systems and integrate with finance, product, and ops workflows. The goal is to make billing as flexible as the product itself.

How does Orb help SaaS teams scale pricing?

Orb enables SaaS companies to scale pricing by decoupling usage data from pricing logic, allowing instant updates without engineering bottlenecks. It supports simulations, versioned plans, and metering across any dimension. This advantage lets teams price more effectively and grow without billing overhead.

Future-proof your SaaS billing with the help of Orb

Orb gives your team the flexibility, control, and visibility needed to design and scale advanced monetization strategies without rebuilding your infrastructure every time pricing evolves. 

Whether you're iterating on a tiered model or layering in usage components, Orb supports the operational agility and revenue efficiency modern SaaS companies need to stay ahead. Here’s how Orb can help you with your approach to tiered and usage-based pricing and beyond:

• Price smarter for what’s next: Tiered plans might cover your base offering, but many SaaS companies drive growth through premium features, overage charges, and upsell paths. 
  
  With Orb Simulations, you can test pricing changes for these add-ons before launch by modeling outcomes on real historical data. Forecast how a shift in plan thresholds or feature access affects conversion, expansion, and churn, without engineering involvement.

• Bill hybrid with confidence: If you’re mixing fixed tiers with usage-based add-ons (like extra storage, custom integrations, or real-time collaboration modules), Orb’s architecture gives you the tools to make it work accurately and transparently. 
  
  Orb processes raw event data with your pricing logic to generate itemized, customer-ready invoices. This not only strengthens trust but also supports your finance team with complete, auditable records.

• Manage ongoing value with clarity: From monthly feature packs to quarterly service credits, hybrid billing models require a unified view of recurring and variable revenue. Orb surfaces a real-time picture of account-level activity. 
  
  You get a consistent revenue stream overview (integrated with your CRM and financial systems) and access to billing analytics that show how different pricing levers impact performance.

• Your guide to what’s next in monetization: Orb is more than a billing platform; it’s a strategic partner. Our team works closely with you to configure pricing logic, migrate your data safely, and optimize your revenue model. 
  
  If you’re experimenting with new monetization styles — be it credits, pay-as-you-go, or usage rollovers — Orb helps make sure you can adapt quickly while maintaining accuracy and stability.

• Unlock customer insights that drive growth: Even in a fixed-pricing model, customer behavior tells a deeper story. Orb captures usage patterns for any metric, such as  premium features, support entitlements, or in-app upgrades. 
  
  These insights help SaaS businesses optimize their packaging, identify cross-sell opportunities, and improve retention through value-aligned offerings. For SaaS communication software especially, visibility into message volume, active seats, or integration usage can inform roadmap decisions and new monetization opportunities.

If you’re seeking SaaS opportunities that align with the latest software industry trends, Orb provides the infrastructure to pursue them without compromising billing accuracy or speed.

Ready to bring precision and adaptability to how you manage and grow revenue? See how our platform can serve as the foundation for your evolving monetization strategy.

Explore Orb’s flexible pricing options.