Best usage-based billing software for B2B SaaS

Usage-based pricing has become mainstream in B2B SaaS and is growing fastest among AI, cloud infrastructure, and developer tools companies. Some 2026 datasets now show consumption pricing as the most common contract model, with Vertice's Q2 2026 contract data placing consumption-based pricing at 36.5%, ahead of per-user at 32.4% and hybrid at 31.1%. Broader research still finds subscriptions dominant overall: hy's 2026 SaaS & AI Pricing Report, based on more than 4,000 software profiles, reports 92% subscription-model adoption versus 37% usage-based adoption. Unlike flat-rate pricing, usage-based billing ties charges to measured consumption, and when the chosen usage metric is a good proxy for customer value, it can align pricing more closely with the value customers receive. That shift requires specialized billing infrastructure capable of handling real-time event ingestion, complex pricing calculations, and accurate invoicing at scale.

The challenge is that building this infrastructure in-house demands significant engineering resources and ongoing maintenance. For most teams, the incumbent is not another vendor at all: it is a homegrown stack where pricing, usage aggregation, credits, and invoices live inside the product codebase. That approach offers real control and early flexibility, but as pricing evolves and contracts diversify, complexity compounds, and every pricing change or contract nuance requires code and careful testing. A purpose-built usage-based billing engine can handle metering, pricing logic, invoicing, and revenue recognition while freeing your team to focus on core product development. This guide examines seven leading usage-based billing platforms, evaluating their capabilities for high-growth B2B SaaS companies.

Key takeaways

• Data retention and replayability enable pricing flexibility: Platforms that preserve raw usage events or sufficiently granular historical detail, and that support replay or re-rating, make corrections and historical pricing analysis substantially easier. Architectures differ in how much underlying detail they keep alongside aggregated rollups.
• Pricing simulations reduce deployment risk: Testing new pricing models against historical usage data before going live helps forecast revenue impact and avoid costly mistakes that affect customer relationships.
• Custom SQL metrics unlock complex billing scenarios: The ability to define billable metrics using SQL queries supports advanced pricing logic across dimensions like region, model type, and customer segment without engineering changes.
• Real-time customer dashboards improve transparency: Customer-facing usage visibility can improve spend transparency and self-service, and may reduce billing-related questions and bill shock for finance and operations teams.
• End-to-end coverage reduces integration surface area: Some platforms concentrate on metering and rating, while others concentrate on invoicing, collections, and revenue recognition. Systems that cover metering, pricing, invoicing, AR, and reporting in one place reduce the number of handoffs between tools.
• Integration depth varies significantly: Enterprise platforms offer broad ERP and CRM connections, while some solutions prioritize specific ecosystems or require additional configuration for complete workflows.

1. Orb

Orb is a revenue design platform built specifically for usage-based, hybrid, and enterprise billing. Where some platforms add usage billing on top of a subscription management foundation, Orb's architecture was designed from the ground up for consumption-based pricing models.

Key capabilities for B2B SaaS teams

• Raw usage event billing architecture: Orb persistently stores and references raw usage events and calculates bills by querying that history at billing time, enabling backfills, late data handling, backdated changes, and auditability without re-instrumentation. For extremely high-volume workloads, Orb also offers Hosted Rollups, which perform streaming aggregation as data is ingested.
• SQL-based custom metrics: Define any billable metric using advanced SQL queries, supporting complex aggregations like averages, maximums, and minimums across multiple dimensions.
• Pricing simulations: Test pricing scenarios using real usage data, compare models side by side, and forecast customer and revenue impact before launch.
• Dimensional pricing: 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.
• High-throughput event ingestion: Orb's enterprise platform is regularly stress-tested at 250K+ events per second, with hosted rollups that support billions of events daily through streaming aggregation.
• End-to-end billing and finance coverage: Metering, pricing, subscriptions, invoicing, AR, and revenue reporting run in one platform, with clean syncs into ERPs such as NetSuite and QuickBooks and into tax providers including Anrok, Sphere, and Avalara.

B2B SaaS use cases

Orb excels for AI companies billing for tokens, API calls, or compute usage. Cloud infrastructure providers use dimensional price groups to price compute across region, instance type, and bandwidth from a single pricing configuration. Developer platforms leverage the Experience Kit for advanced real-time usage dashboards, pricing calculators, and checkout flows with draft-invoice visibility that help customers plan and optimize their spend.

Results from Orb customers demonstrate the platform's impact: Vercel reports 80% reduction in engineering time required for billing across new products, along with a 50% reduction in hiring needs for manual reconciliation, and it now iterates on pricing across 60+ SKUs. Stytch achieved a 75% reduction in ops team billing work. Knock saved six months of engineering time by fully automating usage-based billing on Orb. Replit stood up Orb in one month with a single engineer and has seen 40x revenue growth since using Orb to monetize usage.

Pricing structure

• Core: Usage-based pricing tied to billings and events, including real-time event ingestion, hybrid and usage billing, Orb Invoicing, and finance and tax integrations
• Advanced: Includes hosted rollups, customer hierarchy billing, data warehouse sync, NetSuite integration, Salesforce sync, and premium support
• Enterprise: Everything in Advanced, enterprise-grade SLAs, and dedicated support

Every plan includes invoicing and accounting integrations such as Stripe, plus tax integrations including Avalara, Anrok, Numeral, Sphere, Stripe Tax, and TaxJar. Data warehouse sync is available on Advanced and Enterprise, which additionally carry a platform fee.

Why Orb leads for usage-based billing

Orb's architectural foundation, calculating invoices by querying persisted raw usage events rather than relying on pre-aggregated counters alone, creates downstream advantages that compound over time. When your pricing team wants to test a new model, they can run simulations against historical data without engineering involvement. When a customer disputes a charge, you can trace every invoice line item back to the specific raw usage events that generated it. When you need to correct billing errors, backfills flow through the system and unfinalized billing state recalculates automatically, while issued invoices are preserved and corrected through credit notes or voiding, which keeps the audit trail intact.

That foundation is what Orb describes as revenue design: automating billing, executing pricing changes quickly, and using granular usage data to grow revenue, all on one system rather than three. Pinecone adopted Orb as a single source of truth for a nuanced multi-product usage model, avoiding the need to hire a dedicated billing team and giving every function the same numbers. Dune moved from a simple binary model to granular usage-based pricing with tiers and credits, then evolved that pricing repeatedly without drawing on engineering resources. Opus replaced manual invoice calculation with automated credits and overages, plus transparent customer balances.

Adyen's acquisition of Orb closed on July 1, 2026. Orb continues as a standalone product, customers can keep choosing their preferred payment-processing partner, and Orb says joining Adyen will help it build future offerings that connect billing with global financial infrastructure. That backing, combined with a customer base that includes Vercel, Supabase, Replit, LaunchDarkly, and Neo4j, demonstrates the platform's enterprise readiness.

2. Metronome

Metronome is an enterprise usage-based billing platform and is now part of Stripe. The companies announced the deal in December 2025 and completed the acquisition in January 2026. The platform has particular strength in large-scale infrastructure companies with complex contract requirements.

Primary focus

• Enterprise contract machinery: Strong support for committed spend, drawdowns, true-ups, rollover, and multi-year deals with complex rate cards.
• Metering at scale: Metronome supports metering for large volumes of usage events.
• Prepaid credits and wallets: Credit management for enterprise customers with committed usage agreements.
• Stripe integration: Metronome already integrated natively with Stripe before the acquisition; becoming a Stripe product has since enabled deeper product integration and a unified roadmap.
• Contract flexibility: Supports amendments, renewals, credits, and complex enterprise billing terms.

B2B SaaS positioning

Metronome's deepest strength remains enterprise agreement complexity, including rate cards, drawdowns, commitments, and contract amendments. Following the Stripe acquisition, however, Metronome positions the combined offering across the full spectrum of company sizes, from two-person startups up to global public companies, covering both product-led and sales-led motions.

Organizational fit

Metronome fits companies with enterprise sales motions involving committed spend agreements, credits, and complex contract terms, and it now also targets earlier-stage and product-led businesses. Organizations already in the Stripe ecosystem may find the integration particularly valuable for unified payment and billing workflows. Teams whose priorities also include simulating pricing over historical usage and running invoicing, AR, and revenue reporting in the same system as metering commonly evaluate it alongside end-to-end platforms such as Orb.

3. Lago

Lago is an open-source billing platform with a full usage-billing stack, offering both self-hosted and managed cloud deployment under an AGPLv3 license.

Primary focus

• Open-source foundation: Source-code access under AGPLv3 with self-hosted deployment and control over your own infrastructure and billing data.
• Event-based architecture: Event ingestion with code-based metric definitions.
• No revenue share: Cloud pricing does not include percentage-based fees on billing volume.
• Self-hosted option: Deploy on your own infrastructure for data residency and compliance requirements.
• Integration ecosystem: Connections to Stripe, Adyen, GoCardless, and accounting systems.

B2B SaaS positioning

Lago targets organizations that require source-code transparency, data residency control, or want to avoid vendor lock-in. The platform supports usage-based billing workflows with both self-hosted and managed deployment options.

Organizational fit

Lago is designed for engineering teams comfortable with self-hosted infrastructure who prioritize open-source transparency. Self-hosting Lago involves owning DevOps, infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance, and a managed Lago Cloud service is available for teams that prefer not to run it themselves. Teams that would rather direct engineering capacity toward the core product typically compare it with fully managed, usage-native platforms such as Orb.

4. m3ter

m3ter is an enterprise pricing infrastructure platform with strong CRM and ERP integration capabilities, including a native AWS Marketplace billing integration that sends billing data generated in m3ter to a software vendor's own AWS Marketplace listing. Salesforce completed its acquisition of m3ter on July 1, 2026.

Primary focus

• Schema-agnostic metering: Flexible event ingestion with configurable meters, derived fields, and segmentation that adapt to different data structures.
• Contract billing: Entered customer preview in November 2025, supporting contract-specific billing, grouping, and usage filters for improved accuracy with complex pricing.
• CRM integration: An expanded Salesforce and Revenue Cloud integration shipped in March 2026, ahead of the Salesforce acquisition closing.
• Data retention: At least 24 months of unaggregated, processed usage measurements retained for audit, reconciliation, and recalculation.
• Enterprise integrations: Native connections to NetSuite, Salesforce, and other business applications, extended by the m3sh Workflows launch in January 2026.

B2B SaaS positioning

m3ter targets enterprise organizations with complex CRM and ERP integration requirements. The platform emphasizes finance and billing operations workflows with strong accounting system connectivity.

Organizational fit

m3ter is designed for enterprise companies with established Salesforce and NetSuite investments who need usage-based billing that integrates deeply with existing business systems. Salesforce has owned the platform since July 2026, which is a useful data point for buyers thinking about how their billing layer sits relative to the rest of their stack.

5. Chargebee

Chargebee originated as a subscription-management platform and now provides native usage ingestion, metering, and billing alongside subscription and hybrid models.

Primary focus

• Native usage billing on subscription foundations: Chargebee now describes usage as a "first-class citizen" in its platform, with native raw-event ingestion, no-code metering, SUM and COUNT aggregations, advanced SQL queries, and support for large event volumes.
• Full-stack solution: Includes tax automation, dunning, customer portals, and 35+ payment gateway connections.
• Tax calculation and compliance partners: Chargebee calculates charges across 50+ tax jurisdictions and integrates with tax-compliance providers such as Anrok for registrations and filing.
• Self-service portals: Customer-facing interfaces for subscription and usage management.
• Broad integrations: Connections across CRM, accounting, and business applications.

B2B SaaS positioning

Chargebee serves companies that combine subscription billing with usage and hybrid pricing, and its metering is now built directly into the platform rather than supplied by an external metering provider. As of G2's Winter 2026 reports, Chargebee reported 27 consecutive quarters as #1 in Subscription Management, along with Enterprise and Mid-Market Leader positions in the separate Subscription Billing category.

Organizational fit

Chargebee is designed for businesses with substantial subscription-management requirements that are layering in usage and hybrid models. On pricing, the Starter plan is free for the first $250,000 in cumulative billing and then applies a 0.75% fee on subsequent billings, while other plans use different structures, including Performance at $7,188 per year for up to $100K in monthly billing and quote-based Enterprise pricing. Companies whose revenue model is primarily usage-led rather than subscription-led often weigh it against usage-native platforms such as Orb.

6. Maxio

Maxio is a B2B SaaS financial operations platform focused on finance team requirements. Battery Ventures brought Chargify and SaaSOptics together in 2021, and the combined business publicly launched the Maxio brand in April 2022.

Primary focus

• Revenue recognition: ASC 606 and IFRS 15 compliance built into the billing workflow.
• SaaS metrics dashboards: MRR, ARR, churn, and cohort analysis integrated with billing data.
• Finance-first design: Built for finance team workflows including month-end close and reporting.
• Subscription and usage management: Maxio combines subscription management with dedicated metering. Maxio Metering launched in March 2025 with event tracking, multi-attribute rating, and usage, value, and hybrid models, and its May and June 2026 product updates have continued expanding metering and pricing formulas.
• Multi-entity support: Handles complex corporate structures with consolidated reporting.

B2B SaaS positioning

Maxio targets finance-led B2B SaaS organizations where revenue recognition and SaaS metrics are primary requirements alongside billing functionality.

Organizational fit

Maxio is designed for companies with strong finance team influence over billing decisions and requirements for integrated revenue recognition. Its Grow plan is $599 per month for businesses with up to $100K in monthly billings; companies above that threshold move to the quote-based Scale plan.

7. Stripe Billing

Stripe Billing is the billing module within Stripe's payment infrastructure, offering subscription and usage-based billing integrated with Stripe's payment processing. Note that Metronome is now a Stripe product as well; the two are listed separately here because they expose different product surfaces, but they belong to the same vendor and their capabilities increasingly overlap.

Primary focus

• Payment integration: Native connection to Stripe payment processing and checkout.
• Subscription and usage billing: Recurring billing combined with native usage metering.
• Developer experience: Extensive API documentation and SDKs for technical teams.
• Global payments: Support for international payment methods and currencies.
• Usage metering: Stripe's current usage-based billing architecture uses Billing Meters and meter events; the legacy Usage Records and Usage Record Summary APIs were removed in the March 31, 2025 API release.

B2B SaaS positioning

Stripe Billing serves companies already using Stripe for payments who want integrated billing without adding a separate vendor. Stripe said in January 2026 that thousands of customers already used Stripe Billing for complex usage-based revenue models, and with Metronome it now supports multidimensional metering, custom contracting, and more sophisticated usage scenarios. At Sessions 2026, Stripe announced commits, multidimensional pricing, bespoke contracts, revenue visibility, and deeper Metronome integration within the Stripe ecosystem.

Organizational fit

Stripe Billing suits companies that prioritize payment processing integration and want billing in the same stack. A common pattern among usage-led companies is to keep Stripe for payments while running the billing logic and invoicing in a usage-native platform such as Orb, which preserves payment choice while consolidating metering, pricing, invoicing, and revenue reporting in one place. Supabase and Knock both centralized billing in Orb this way, improving invoice fidelity and recovering product-level revenue detail for finance.

Why Orb stands out for usage-based billing

When evaluating usage-based billing software, the architectural foundation matters more than feature checklists. Orb's approach of persisting raw usage events and querying them at invoice time creates advantages that become more valuable as billing complexity increases.

Pricing flexibility without engineering bottlenecks

Systems that keep only running totals, without the underlying events or sufficiently granular summaries, can require re-instrumenting your product whenever you change how usage is measured or priced. Orb stores raw usage events and calculates invoices by querying them. Your pricing team can iterate on models, test new packaging, and correct errors without waiting for engineering sprints.

This translates to real business outcomes. When LaunchDarkly launched its self-serve business, Orb supported rapid price iteration, and LaunchDarkly says Orb was the only vendor it evaluated that supported everything it needed out of the box. Usage visibility that previously took as long as eight hours now appears within seconds, and advanced dashboards improved transparency and customer trust.

Simulations that de-risk pricing changes

Orb Simulations lets teams test pricing scenarios using real usage data, compare models side by side, and forecast customer and revenue impact before launch. Simulation runs inside the same platform that stores the underlying raw usage events and powers production billing, so the model you test is the model you ship. That closes the loop on one of the highest-stakes decisions B2B SaaS companies face, and it lets product and finance answer "what if we change pricing this way?" without a code change or a spreadsheet exercise.

Customer-facing tools that improve transparency

The Experience Kit enables advanced real-time usage dashboards, pricing calculators, and checkout flows that surface draft invoices during purchase, all embeddable directly in your product. This transparency helps customers plan and optimize their usage, and it can build trust and reduce billing-related support questions. Supabase processes over 1.5 million invoices per month through Orb, with detailed invoices and real-time usage insights, and reduced billing-related fees by roughly 0.4% of revenue while improving invoice transparency. Materialize describes Orb as the source of truth for its usage information.

Finance workflows that close gaps

Beyond billing, Orb provides finance workflows including revenue recognition reporting aligned to ASC 606, AR aging reports, and native NetSuite integration. Every invoice line ties back to the raw usage events behind it, so finance teams can explain a number as easily as they can report it, close books faster, and avoid manual reconciliation between billing and accounting systems.

Enterprise validation and scale

Orb's customer base includes some of the most demanding usage-based businesses: Vercel, Replit, Supabase, LaunchDarkly, Pinecone, and Neo4j. The platform handles billions of events daily, and 99.99% SLAs are available. SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II certifications address compliance requirements for regulated industries.

For B2B SaaS companies where usage-based billing is central to the business model rather than an afterthought, Orb provides the architectural foundation, pricing flexibility, and enterprise capabilities that usage-led businesses need as they scale.

Frequently asked questions

What is the main benefit of usage-based billing software for B2B SaaS?

Usage-based billing ties charges to measured consumption, so customers pay for what they actually use rather than a flat subscription fee. When the usage metric is a good proxy for value, the model can lower barriers to initial adoption, support natural expansion revenue as usage grows, and improve alignment between revenue and cost to serve. The tradeoff is variability: Stripe's guidance notes that usage-based revenue can be unpredictable, and Vertice's 2026 data shows substantially greater monthly budget variance for consumption-priced software than seat-priced software. Commitments or hybrid models can improve predictability. Usage-based pricing has grown quickly in B2B SaaS, particularly in AI and infrastructure, and some 2026 datasets now show it as the most common contract model even as broader research still finds subscriptions dominant overall.

How does usage-based billing software handle complex pricing scenarios?

Advanced platforms like Orb support dimensional pricing across multiple usage dimensions at once. For example, Orb's dimensional price groups let a cloud provider price compute by region, instance type, and environment using a single pricing configuration for dimension combinations. SQL-based metrics enable custom billing logic for scenarios like tiered pricing, volume discounts, or average-based calculations without requiring engineering changes.

Can usage-based billing software help with retroactive pricing adjustments?

Platforms that preserve raw usage events or sufficiently granular historical detail, and that support replay or re-rating, can apply retroactive changes and recalculate affected billing state. Orb, for instance, supports backfills and backdated changes so unfinalized billing state recalculates automatically, while issued invoices are preserved and corrected through credit notes or voiding, which keeps a clean audit trail. This capability matters for scenarios like late contract renewals, infrastructure outages requiring credits, or pricing corrections. Systems that retain only aggregated totals, without the underlying events or granular summaries, generally require manual reconciliation for the same adjustments.

What security and compliance standards should I look for in billing software?

Evaluate the assurance reports relevant to your control environment. SOC 1 covers controls at a service organization relevant to user entities' internal control over financial reporting, while SOC 2 covers the applicable Trust Services Criteria, including security and potentially availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Which reports a buyer requires depends on the platform's function and the buyer's own controls. Look for complete audit logging that tracks all billing system changes with timestamps and user attribution. For revenue recognition, workflows should supply the contract, usage, service-period, and allocation data needed to apply ASC 606; the actual accounting treatment, including prepaid credits and variable usage arrangements, depends on contract terms, performance obligations, transaction-price allocation, and recognition timing, as KPMG's software and SaaS revenue handbook and EY's analysis of usage and outcome-based arrangements both emphasize.

How long does implementation typically take for usage-based billing software?

Implementation time varies significantly by platform and complexity. Narrow implementations and proofs of concept can sometimes be completed within days or weeks, and some customers backfill historical data to maintain complete records from day one. Production timelines vary widely with instrumentation, historical migration, contract complexity, ERP and CRM integration, and reconciliation requirements, and broader quote-to-cash transformation programs commonly run several months. Purpose-built platforms can compress that considerably: Replit chose Orb rather than building internally, which it estimated would have delayed a key product launch by four to six months, and stood up Orb in one month with a single engineer.