AI Monetization

16 min read

Best usage-based billing software for fintech companies

Written by

Pranathi Tipparam

Fintech companies can strain billing systems designed primarily around fixed recurring subscriptions, particularly when pricing depends on transaction volume, credits, multiple currencies, and contract-specific usage logic. Transaction fees, interchange pricing, multi-currency operations, and complex credit systems require billing infrastructure that can adapt to consumption-based models while maintaining the accuracy finance teams need for compliance. This guide examines seven usage-based billing platforms through the lens of fintech-specific requirements, including pricing flexibility, usage data, finance workflows, credits, customer hierarchies, and global operations.

Key takeaways

  • Raw usage events support corrections and auditability: Orb's standard billing architecture persists granular raw usage events rather than requiring customers to pre-aggregate usage. For exceptionally high-volume workloads, Orb also offers Hosted Rollups, which aggregate configured event data during ingestion. Retention of raw usage events supports detailed bill calculation, backfills, re-rating, and correction workflows, while finalized invoices remain subject to billing and accounting controls.
  • Fintech pricing often combines several monetization layers: Transaction fees, interchange++ pricing, prepaid credits, minimum commitments, overages, dimensional pricing, and hybrid subscription-plus-usage models can create a large number of contract and billing states as a company scales.
  • Pricing execution is cross-functional: Product, engineering, sales, finance, and RevOps all interact with pricing. Platforms that let teams configure metrics and pricing through SQL and visual tools can reduce the amount of product code and manual coordination required for monetization changes.
  • Multi-entity and multi-currency support matters for global operations: Fintech companies operating across legal entities, currencies, or jurisdictions benefit from billing systems that can represent those structures consistently across invoices and finance workflows.
  • Revenue recognition and ERP workflows affect finance scalability: Revenue-recognition functionality, period controls, and accounting integrations can improve consistency, reduce manual close work, and support audit preparation when they are configured to match the company's accounting policies and contract terms.

1. Orb

Orb is a particularly strong fit for fintech teams that need granular usage billing, flexible pricing, retroactive correction workflows, credits, finance controls, and native ERP and CRM integrations. Orb supports a broad range of usage-based and hybrid pricing models, including tiered and bulk pricing, dimensional pricing, fixed-plus-usage structures, credits, and custom SQL-defined billable metrics.

Key capabilities for fintech teams

  • Raw usage events: Orb's standard billing architecture ingests and persists raw usage events rather than requiring pre-aggregated metrics. This supports detailed billing calculations, backfills, corrections, and invoice traceability. For exceptionally high-volume workloads, Hosted Rollups can aggregate configured event data during ingestion.
  • Custom SQL and visual metric tooling: Teams can define complex billable metrics with Custom SQL or Orb's visual editor, then configure price models and price changes in Orb. This gives product and finance teams a direct way to evolve monetization logic without encoding every pricing change in application code.
  • 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.
  • Plan versioning and migrations: Orb supports plan versioning so teams can execute price changes and migrate subscriptions without writing one-off migration scripts or re-ingesting historical usage for eligible changes, while preserving an auditable history of pricing configurations.
  • Prepaid credits and wallet balances: Orb supports prepaid credits and wallet balances with expiration and rollover behavior, plus platform-wide and SKU-scoped credits with auditable drawdown tracking.
  • Pricing simulations: Orb's pricing simulations let teams model proposed pricing against real product usage data before changing production pricing, helping product, finance, and leadership understand potential customer and revenue impact.

Fintech use cases

Orb supports billing mechanics relevant to fintech, including transaction-volume metrics, custom usage metrics, prepaid and scoped credits, and customer hierarchies for multi-organization billing. These capabilities can support transaction pricing, API usage, platform fees, minimum commitments, overages, and customer-specific contracts without hard-coding every billing rule into product infrastructure.

This architecture also addresses a common organizational challenge in usage-based billing. As pricing becomes more complex, engineering can otherwise become the gatekeeper for metering changes, pricing exceptions, backfills, and reconciliation. Orb centralizes raw usage events, metric logic, pricing, billing, and finance workflows so product, engineering, finance, and RevOps can work from the same billing system.

Vercel reports an 80% reduction in the time required to build and launch billing for new products. Supabase processes over 1.5 million invoices per month through Orb. Separately, Materialize's VP of Finance Charles Horner describes Orb as the source of truth for its usage information and a core building block of its financial processes and systems.

Finance integration

Orb's finance workflows support accounts receivable workflows, ASC 606-aligned revenue-recognition reporting, and dunning management. The native NetSuite integration creates standard transaction objects rather than summary imports, supporting reconciliation and audit trails. Accounting period locks prevent retroactive changes to closed periods, with later adjustments flowing forward.

Why Orb stands out for fintech

Orb was built from the ground up for consumption-based billing. Its standard billing accuracy architecture persists raw usage events and supports backfilling and backdating for scenarios such as late data, infrastructure outages, and contract changes. Eligible backfills and backdated changes can automatically recompute draft or pending billing, while issued invoices are preserved and corrected through structured credit-note, void, or void-and-reissue workflows. Closed accounting periods can be locked against edits, with adjustments flowing forward.

That event-level foundation also supports pricing execution. Because raw usage events can be queried by billable metrics, teams can define new metrics, test pricing with simulations, and preserve a detailed link from usage to invoice calculations. This is particularly relevant for fintech businesses where pricing evolves across products, regions, customer segments, credit structures, and negotiated contracts.

Orb maintains SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II reports covering controls relevant to financial reporting and data security, supporting enterprise audit readiness and internal controls.

Orb reports that Replit has seen 40x revenue growth since using Orb to monetize usage. Stytch reports a 75% reduction in the time its team spends on monthly billing.

2. Stripe Billing

Stripe Billing extends Stripe's payments platform into subscription and usage billing, making it relevant for fintech companies that already use Stripe for payment processing and related financial infrastructure.

Primary focus

  • Payment and billing integration: Supports billing workflows within the broader Stripe payments ecosystem.
  • Multi-currency operations: Stripe Payments supports 135+ currencies. Stripe Tax provides tax calculation and reporting in supported jurisdictions and automatically tracks tax-rate and rule changes.
  • Developer tooling: Provides APIs, SDKs, and documentation for billing integrations.
  • Dunning: Supports automated payment retry and collections workflows for failed payments.
  • Broader Stripe ecosystem: Connects with other Stripe products such as Treasury, Connect, Issuing, and Tax.

Fintech positioning

Following Stripe's acquisition of Metronome, Stripe's billing stack supports usage-based and hybrid billing capabilities that include multidimensional pricing, negotiated contracts, commits, credits, and usage visibility. This makes the combined offering relevant to fintech companies that want billing capabilities within the Stripe ecosystem.

Organizational fit

Stripe Billing generally fits teams that prioritize close integration between payments and billing and prefer to keep monetization workflows inside the Stripe ecosystem. Orb's advantage is the way it combines persistent raw usage events with pricing simulations, historical backfills, structured issued-invoice correction workflows, accounting period locks, and native ERP integrations in a usage-native billing platform. That combination is especially useful when pricing evolution, historical corrections, and finance controls become central operating concerns across product, engineering, and finance.

3. Zuora

Zuora is an enterprise subscription and usage management platform used by organizations with broad quote-to-cash, billing, and revenue-management requirements.

Primary focus

  • Quote-to-cash controls: Supports subscription lifecycle management, usage billing, invoicing, and enterprise controls.
  • Usage metering: Zuora acquired Togai in May 2024, adding event ingestion, metering, and rating capabilities to its broader platform.
  • Revenue recognition: Supports configurable revenue-recognition workflows designed around ASC 606 and IFRS 15.
  • Enterprise billing operations: Processes $96+ billion annually across 50 pricing models.
  • Multi-entity support: Supports organizational structures that require consolidated billing and reporting across entities.
  • Implementation tooling: Zuora's July 2026 Milo implementation offering supports quote-to-cash implementation workflows through an AI-powered implementation agent.

Fintech use cases

Zuora supports finance organizations that manage recurring subscriptions, usage charges, multiple entities, currencies, and revenue workflows within an enterprise quote-to-cash environment. These capabilities can map to fintech organizations with mature finance operations and global billing requirements.

Organizational fit

Zuora is commonly associated with enterprise subscription lifecycle, billing, and revenue operations. Orb's advantage is the integration of persistent raw usage events, Custom SQL billable metrics, pricing simulations, plan migrations, structured issued-invoice correction workflows, accounting period locks, and finance integrations within a usage-native revenue design workflow. For fintech teams whose monetization changes frequently, that combination can make Orb a more direct fit for product-led pricing evolution while still supporting finance operations.

4. Maxio

Maxio, formed from the merger of SaaSOptics and Chargify, provides billing and financial operations capabilities for B2B software companies.

Primary focus

  • Billing and revenue recognition: Combines billing, revenue recognition, and accounts receivable workflows.
  • Revenue workflows: Supports automation designed around ASC 606 and IFRS 15 processes.
  • SaaS metrics: Provides financial reporting for metrics such as MRR, churn, and customer lifetime value.
  • Multi-entity support: Supports multiple business entities with consolidated revenue reporting.
  • Usage and hybrid monetization: Supports usage-based and hybrid monetization, including event-based metering, configurable pricing, and pricing backtesting alongside recurring billing.

Fintech positioning

For fintech companies, Maxio can support B2B billing and financial operations across recurring and usage-based models, with revenue recognition, reporting, and multi-entity functionality. Its current materials emphasize SaaS and AI businesses.

Organizational fit

Maxio fits organizations that want billing, revenue recognition, accounts receivable, and SaaS financial reporting in a broader finance operations platform. Orb's advantage is its usage-native revenue design workflow built around persistent raw usage events, Custom SQL metrics, dimensional price groups, pricing simulations, plan migrations, structured issued-invoice correction workflows, and accounting period controls. That combination gives Orb a strong fit when monetization logic itself is changing frequently across products and contracts.

5. Chargebee

Chargebee is a subscription and usage management platform that supports subscription, pure pay-as-you-go, prepaid, and hybrid usage models.

Primary focus

  • Subscription and usage billing: Chargebee combines its established subscription-management capabilities with a native usage-based billing stack supporting usage ingestion, SQL metering, pay-as-you-go, credits, and hybrid pricing.
  • Dunning: Supports collections workflows for failed payments.
  • Multi-currency and multi-gateway operations: Supports global billing with multiple payment processors.
  • Revenue analytics: Provides SaaS reporting for metrics such as MRR, churn, and customer lifetime value.
  • Hybrid model support: Supports combinations of subscription fees and usage overages.

Fintech positioning

Chargebee supports several monetization patterns relevant to fintech, including subscription, pay-as-you-go, prepaid, and hybrid usage billing. Its established subscription-management foundation can be relevant for businesses that combine recurring plans with usage components.

Organizational fit

Chargebee fits companies that want subscription management, usage billing, dunning, payment gateway options, and revenue analytics in one platform. Orb's advantage is its usage-native revenue design workflow built around persistent raw usage events, Custom SQL metrics, dimensional price groups, pricing simulations, plan migrations, structured issued-invoice correction workflows, accounting period controls, and finance integrations. This gives Orb particular strength where fintech pricing and contracts evolve frequently and teams need a shared system for both pricing execution and billing operations.

6. Metronome

Metronome is a usage metering and billing infrastructure platform, acquired by Stripe in January 2026.

Primary focus

  • Usage metering and metric logic: Supports raw usage events, SQL-based metrics, and large usage volumes for usage-based and hybrid monetization.
  • Usage and spend visibility: Supports customer-facing views of usage and spend.
  • Enterprise contracts: Supports commitments, drawdowns, usage ramps, and negotiated pricing structures.
  • Credit management: Supports prepaid balances and committed-spend tracking.
  • Finance and system connections: Connects with Stripe Invoicing and supports CRM and ERP data sync across the broader Stripe ecosystem.

Fintech positioning

Metronome provides metering, pricing, contract management, billing, and invoicing capabilities, along with storage of raw usage events, SQL-based metric definition, usage visibility, credits, and multidimensional usage models. Those capabilities are relevant to fintech infrastructure companies that monetize high volumes of product usage or API activity.

Organizational fit

Metronome fits teams centered on usage metering, contract pricing, and billing infrastructure, particularly inside the broader Stripe ecosystem. Its current Stripe integration also broadens invoicing, collections, and finance-system connections. Orb's advantage is the combination of pricing simulations, historical backfills, plan migrations, structured issued-invoice correction workflows, accounting period locks, and native finance workflows on top of persistent raw usage events. This gives product and finance teams a common system for pricing evolution, billing execution, and controlled historical corrections.

7. Lago

Lago is an open-source usage-based billing platform for organizations that value deployment flexibility and control over billing infrastructure.

Primary focus

  • Open-source core: Lago's core platform is AGPLv3 licensed and supports self-hosted deployment.
  • Data sovereignty: Self-hosting can place billing data and infrastructure within an organization's chosen environment.
  • Event-based metering: Supports usage metering with modular billing components.
  • Platform fee model: Lago states that it does not take a percentage of recurring billing volume. Separate payment-processing fees may still apply.
  • API-first design: Provides modular APIs for teams building custom billing workflows.

Fintech positioning

Lago can fit fintech companies that prioritize open-source deployment, infrastructure control, and customization. Its self-hosted option can support organizations that want billing infrastructure within their own deployment environment, and a managed cloud option is also available.

Organizational fit

Lago fits teams that prioritize open-source architecture and deployment control. Self-hosted deployments place infrastructure operations within the customer's environment, while managed cloud provides another deployment model. Orb takes a managed, end-to-end approach that combines raw usage events, pricing logic, billing, invoicing, finance workflows, simulations, and accounting integrations, which can reduce the number of systems involved in pricing execution and revenue operations.

Why Orb stands out for fintech billing

For fintech companies, billing accuracy is closely connected to revenue reporting, customer trust, and finance operations. Orb addresses those concerns through a usage-native architecture that connects raw usage events, metric logic, pricing, invoices, adjustments, and financial workflows.

Orb's pricing simulations enable teams to model pricing changes against real product usage data before deployment. Product, finance, and leadership can compare scenarios and estimate customer and revenue impact without changing live customer pricing. This matters as pricing complexity compounds across products, credits, minimum commitments, overages, customer segments, and negotiated contracts.

Orb's approach to billing accuracy also provides an auditable path for billing calculations. On its standard event path, usage-based invoice line items can be traced to the underlying raw usage events, while fixed-fee charges trace to applicable pricing and subscription configuration. For exceptionally high-volume workloads using Hosted Rollups, configured usage data can be aggregated during ingestion.

This architecture helps address the cross-functional nature of usage-based billing. Engineering can send product usage into a dedicated billing system, product and finance can work with pricing models and simulations, and finance can reconcile billing outputs into downstream systems. The result is a common operating layer for billing automation, pricing execution, and revenue workflows rather than a collection of separate pricing logic and manual reconciliation steps.

Product and finance teams can iterate with less engineering involvement, and Orb describes its pricing tooling as enabling pricing models to evolve in days rather than quarters. Combined with raw usage events, plan versioning, credits, dimensional price groups, and correction workflows, this gives fintech teams flexibility as products and enterprise contracts become more complex.

Supabase processes over 1.5 million invoices per month through Orb. 99.99% SLAs are available for qualifying enterprise deployments, subject to contractual terms in the MSA. Adyen completed its acquisition of Orb on July 1, 2026. Orb continues to operate as a stand-alone product, and Orb has described the combination as an opportunity to build broader billing, payments, and revenue-optimization offerings over time.

Frequently asked questions

What is usage-based billing and why is it important for fintech companies?

Usage-based billing charges customers based on actual consumption rather than flat subscription fees. For fintech companies, this model can align revenue more closely with customer value when the selected metric, such as transactions processed or API activity, is a good proxy for that value. Usage-based pricing is mainstream across software: Metronome's 2025 research found that 77% of the largest software companies incorporated some usage-based pricing, although that evidence does not establish consumption pricing as the dominant model specifically in fintech. Usage-based models are also frequently combined with subscriptions, credits, minimum commitments, or overages, creating hybrid pricing structures that require flexible metering and billing logic.

How can billing software help fintechs manage complex pricing models and support compliance workflows?

Billing platforms can automate the path from usage data through metric calculation, pricing, invoicing, adjustments, and accounting outputs. Revenue-recognition platforms can automate workflows used to apply ASC 606 and IFRS 15 policies, while raw usage events can support backfills, re-rating, corrections, and audit trails. Accounting integrations can also move billing information into financial systems with consistent mappings and service-period data. Orb's advantage is that these workflows start from raw usage events on its standard event path and connect directly to configurable metrics, pricing, invoicing, correction workflows, finance operations, and ERP integrations. This reduces the need to maintain separate logic across product code, spreadsheets, and finance systems as pricing complexity grows.

What are the key differentiators in a usage-based billing platform for fintech?

Important differentiators include persistence of raw usage events, flexible billable metric definition, dimensional pricing, prepaid credits and wallets, commitments and overages, account hierarchies, multi-entity and multi-currency support, pricing versioning, correction workflows, simulations, revenue-recognition capabilities, and ERP or CRM integrations. A platform's ability to support pricing changes without turning each change into a new engineering project is also relevant as fintech products and customer contracts diversify. Orb combines these capabilities around a usage-native billing core, which is why it stands out for fintech companies that need pricing flexibility and finance-grade traceability in the same system.

Can usage-based billing software integrate with systems like NetSuite or Salesforce?

Yes. Enterprise billing platforms commonly integrate with ERP and CRM systems. Orb provides a native NetSuite integration that creates standard transaction records rather than summary imports, supporting reconciliation and auditability. Orb also supports Salesforce quote-to-cash workflows and synchronization of contract, billing, and usage information for sales-led organizations.

How does a billing platform handle retroactive price changes and customer adjustments?

Retaining raw usage events can make re-rating, backfills, and corrections easier, but whether an already generated or posted invoice is automatically recalculated depends on the platform's adjustment and accounting controls. The operational outcome also depends on the platform's data model, pricing versioning, and invoice state. With Orb, eligible backfills or backdated changes can recompute draft or pending billing, while issued invoices are preserved and corrected through structured credit-note, void, or void-and-reissue workflows. Closed accounting periods can be locked against edits, with adjustments flowing forward. This combination of raw usage events, billing-state controls, and finance-period controls gives teams a structured path for handling corrections without losing the audit trail.

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