Best usage-based billing software for Stripe Payments users

Stripe is widely used by software companies for payment processing, but consumption, API, compute, credit, and outcome-based pricing introduce billing requirements beyond basic recurring charges. The right usage-based billing platform should work cleanly with Stripe Payments while supporting the metering, pricing, invoicing, corrections, and finance workflows required by modern software businesses.

A 2025 Metronome and Greyhound Capital survey of 100 SaaS companies found that 85% of the surveyed companies had adopted usage-based pricing. The finding reflects that specific sample, but it illustrates how common usage-based and hybrid monetization has become. For teams already using Stripe Payments, the practical question is which billing architecture best supports product usage, pricing change, customer clarity, and finance operations as complexity grows.

Usage-based billing is also a cross-functional system. Product defines value metrics and packaging, Sales introduces contract variation, Engineering supplies billing-grade usage data, and Finance must reconcile invoices and revenue. A billing platform therefore has to do more than calculate a usage total. It should help those teams operate from consistent data while keeping customer charges explainable.

Key takeaways

• Raw usage events preserve pricing and correction flexibility: Orb's standard metering path retains granular raw usage events so teams can build billable metrics, backfill usage, apply backdated changes, and maintain detailed billing lineage. For sustained high-volume streaming workloads, Hosted Rollups can aggregate configured event streams during ingestion.
• Pricing simulation connects strategy to actual usage: Orb Simulations lets teams model pricing changes against historical product usage before production rollout, including customer-level and revenue-level impact.
• Stripe compatibility can take different forms: Some platforms are part of the Stripe ecosystem, while others integrate with Stripe Payments as an external payment processor. The distinction affects how billing, pricing, invoicing, and finance workflows are organized.
• Billing architecture affects customer trust: Usage-based charges can vary from period to period, so transparent usage detail, predictable correction workflows, and clear invoices matter alongside metering accuracy.
• Finance workflows are part of the billing decision: Revenue recognition inputs, accounts receivable, ERP synchronization, and audit trails become increasingly important as usage pricing combines with credits, commitments, custom contracts, and hybrid models.

1. Orb

Orb is a usage-native revenue design and billing platform built for companies with consumption-based, hybrid, and contract-specific pricing. Its standard metering architecture retains granular raw usage events as the basis for billable metrics and pricing calculations. That foundation supports historical analysis, pricing iteration, backfills, backdated changes, and auditable billing corrections without requiring the underlying usage data to be re-created.

Key capabilities for Stripe users

• SQL-based billable metrics: Orb supports standard metric types such as count, unique count, sum, maximum, minimum, and average, plus custom SQL for conditional logic, subqueries, and other complex billable metrics over raw usage events.
• Pricing simulation: Orb Simulations uses historical product usage to model proposed pricing and show projected customer and revenue impact before production rollout.
• Backfills and backdated changes: Orb's invoicing workflows support recalculating affected unfinalized billing after usage or pricing changes. Issued invoices are preserved as historical records and corrected through auditable workflows such as credit notes, voiding, or reissuance.
• 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.
• Scaled event ingestion: Orb supports scaled event ingestion through API and S3 at volumes such as 250,000+ events per second. Hosted Rollups support hosted streaming aggregation for sustained high-volume workloads.
• Hybrid and enterprise pricing structures: Orb supports combinations of usage charges, fixed fees, per-seat components, prepaid credits, minimums, commitments, discounts, and customer-specific terms.

Stripe integration depth

Orb integrates with Stripe for payment collection while Orb manages metering, pricing, billing, and invoicing workflows. Orb's Stripe Billing migration guide states that existing Stripe customer records, tax configurations, and payment methods can remain intact when Stripe Payments stays in place.

Adyen completed its acquisition of Orb on July 1, 2026. In Orb's acquisition update, Orb states that it continues to operate as a stand-alone product and that customers can continue using their preferred payment-processing partner. For Stripe Payments users, this means Stripe can remain the payment processor while Orb serves as the billing and revenue design layer.

Use cases

Orb is well suited to AI companies billing on tokens, compute, actions, or outcomes, cloud infrastructure providers with dimensional pricing, developer platforms moving toward usage-based models, and B2B software companies combining subscriptions with credits, commitments, overages, and enterprise-specific terms.

This breadth matters as pricing complexity compounds. A company may begin with one metric and one plan, then add credits, minimum commitments, multiple products, regional pricing, customer-specific discounts, and sales-negotiated terms. Orb provides a common billing foundation for those changes so Product, Engineering, Finance, and RevOps can work from the same usage and billing data.

Customer outcomes

Vercel's customer case study reports an 80% decrease in the time required to build and launch billing for new products. Stytch's customer case study reports a 75% reduction in time spent processing bills and invoicing. Orb also reports that Replit has seen 40x revenue growth since using Orb to monetize usage. Orb's Supabase case study reports significant invoicing cost savings and more than 1.5 million invoices per month through Orb.

Pricing structure

Orb pricing is custom across Core, Advanced, and Enterprise. Orb states that pricing is based on billings and events, with a platform fee included for Advanced and Enterprise. Core includes event ingestion, hybrid and usage-based billing, invoicing, and finance and tax integrations. Advanced adds capabilities including data warehouse synchronization, Salesforce, NetSuite, customer hierarchy, and premium support. Enterprise adds enterprise-grade SLAs and dedicated support.

Orb maintains SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II attestations, with 99.99% SLAs available for enterprise customers.

Why Orb stands out for Stripe users

Orb combines retained raw usage events, query-based metrics, pricing simulation, dimensional pricing, retroactive correction workflows, invoicing, accounts receivable, revenue reporting, and finance integrations in one platform. For teams using Stripe Payments, that creates a billing layer designed for pricing evolution without requiring a change to the payment-processing relationship.

The architectural advantage is not only metering flexibility. It is the ability to use the same usage foundation across pricing execution, invoice calculation, corrections, customer visibility, and finance workflows. That helps reduce the handoffs that otherwise appear when separate systems own usage aggregation, billing logic, invoicing, and financial reporting.

2. Stripe Billing + Metronome

Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome on January 14, 2026. Metronome is now a Stripe product for usage-based billing within Stripe's broader revenue stack.

Key capabilities

• Stripe ecosystem integration: Metronome is part of Stripe and supports usage-based monetization alongside Stripe Billing and Stripe Payments.
• Raw usage events: Metronome supports storing raw usage events and defining SQL-based metrics without requiring pre-aggregation.
• Usage and hybrid pricing: Metronome supports usage-based, credit-based, multidimensional, enterprise contract, and hybrid pricing structures.
• Payments and collections: Stripe provides payment processing, invoicing, retry, and broader payment-method support within its ecosystem.
• Revenue stack coverage: Stripe offers adjacent products for tax, fraud prevention, reporting, and revenue recognition.

Organizational fit

Stripe Billing + Metronome is a natural fit for teams that want usage-based billing within the Stripe ecosystem and prefer to organize metering, billing, payments, and adjacent revenue workflows around a single vendor relationship. Stripe identifies Metronome as supporting major AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA.

Pricing structure

Stripe publishes usage-based and subscription billing pricing for Stripe Billing and offers Metronome as an advanced usage-based billing product. Packaging depends on the billing configuration and product combination.

Considerations for Stripe users

The primary advantage is ecosystem consolidation. Teams already standardized on Stripe can keep usage billing, payment processing, and related Stripe revenue products within the same product family. Orb offers a different model: a stand-alone usage-native billing platform that can continue using Stripe Payments while also preserving payment processor choice.

3. Lago

Lago is an open-source billing platform for usage-based, subscription, and hybrid pricing. The core Lago platform is distributed under the AGPLv3 license and can be self-hosted or used through Lago's managed offering.

Key capabilities

• Open-source architecture: Teams can inspect, extend, and operate the billing platform on their own infrastructure.
• Usage metering and pricing: Lago supports multiple aggregation methods and usage-based pricing configurations.
• Payment provider integrations: Lago supports Stripe Payments, Adyen, GoCardless, and additional payment integration paths.
• Deployment choice: Lago supports self-hosted deployments as well as managed cloud options.
• Security controls: Lago states that its fully hosted version has achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance.

Organizational fit

Lago fits teams that place a high value on source access, deployment control, self-hosting, or the ability to customize billing infrastructure directly. Its payment provider support also allows Stripe Payments to remain part of the stack without making Stripe the billing system of record.

Pricing structure

Lago provides an open-source self-hosted option and commercial managed offerings. Commercial packaging varies by deployment and feature requirements.

Considerations for Stripe users

Lago's open-source model is a meaningful advantage for organizations that want direct infrastructure control. Orb takes a managed revenue design approach, combining raw usage events, pricing simulation, invoicing, finance workflows, and enterprise billing operations in one platform while still supporting Stripe for payment collection.

4. Chargebee

Chargebee is a recurring billing and monetization platform with usage-based billing, subscription management, revenue recognition, receivables, and payment gateway integrations. Chargebee states that it serves more than 6,500 businesses globally and was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Recurring Billing Applications.

Key capabilities

• Hybrid billing models: Chargebee supports subscriptions, usage charges, included usage, overages, and other mixed pricing structures.
• Usage ingestion and billing: Chargebee supports usage event ingestion through multiple integration paths and connects those events to billing workflows.
• Revenue recognition: Chargebee RevRec supports revenue recognition workflows aligned with ASC 606 and IFRS 15 requirements.
• Payment gateway coverage: Chargebee supports multiple payment gateways, including Stripe.
• Commercial lifecycle modules: Chargebee provides products spanning billing, CPQ, receivables, growth workflows, and revenue recognition.

Organizational fit

Chargebee fits companies that want subscription management, usage billing, payment gateway choice, and finance-oriented monetization workflows within a broad recurring revenue platform. Its established subscription and finance capabilities can be useful for businesses with mixed recurring and usage-based models.

Pricing structure

Chargebee publishes a Flow plan with usage-based pricing and an included usage event allowance, along with enterprise packaging for larger and more complex deployments.

Considerations for Stripe users

Chargebee provides broad payment gateway coverage and can use Stripe as one processor among several. Orb is designed around a raw usage events foundation and adds pricing simulation, backfills, dimensional pricing, and revenue design workflows for teams that want pricing evolution and billing execution to share the same usage data layer.

5. Maxio

Maxio combines billing, subscription management, revenue recognition, accounts receivable, and financial reporting for B2B SaaS and AI companies. The platform includes usage-based billing and metering capabilities alongside finance-led workflows.

Key capabilities

• Billing and revenue recognition: Maxio combines subscription and usage billing with revenue recognition workflows.
• Usage-based billing: Maxio supports usage-based billing, with metering and formula capabilities for usage calculations.
• CRM and ERP integrations: Maxio integrates with systems including NetSuite, Salesforce, and HubSpot.
• Accounts receivable and reporting: The platform includes collections, dunning, financial reporting, and revenue operations capabilities.
• Published entry pricing: Maxio publishes pricing for its Grow tier and uses custom pricing for larger Scale deployments.

Organizational fit

Maxio fits B2B SaaS companies where finance and revenue operations are central to billing system ownership. Its combination of billing, revenue recognition, reporting, and collections supports teams that want these workflows organized in a finance-oriented platform.

Pricing structure

Maxio publishes a Grow plan for companies within a defined monthly billings range and uses custom pricing for its Scale plan.

Considerations for Stripe users

Maxio provides an established finance workflow layer around recurring and usage-based billing. Orb is designed for teams that want raw usage events, SQL-defined metrics, simulations, dimensional pricing, invoicing, and finance workflows to operate together on a usage-native billing foundation.

6. Zuora

Zuora provides an enterprise monetization platform spanning usage-based billing, subscriptions, payments, revenue recognition, and quote-to-cash workflows. Silver Lake and GIC completed their acquisition of Zuora on February 14, 2025.

Key capabilities

• Usage mediation and rating: Zuora supports usage event ingestion, mediation, rating, and usage-based billing within its enterprise billing platform.
• Broad pricing model support: Zuora supports usage, prepaid, tiered, volume, commitment, subscription, and hybrid pricing structures.
• Revenue recognition: Zuora Revenue supports ASC 606 and IFRS 15 revenue recognition workflows.
• Quote-to-cash coverage: Zuora connects product catalog, quoting, billing, payments, and revenue operations across an enterprise monetization stack.
• Payment gateway support: Zuora supports multiple payment gateway integrations for international payment operations.

Organizational fit

Zuora fits large organizations that want a broad enterprise monetization suite across subscriptions, usage, quote-to-cash, payments, and revenue recognition. It is commonly relevant where billing operations span multiple products, entities, contract structures, and finance processes.

Pricing structure

Zuora uses custom pricing shaped by product scope, transaction volume, business model, regions, and implementation requirements.

Considerations for Stripe users

Zuora provides broad enterprise monetization coverage and supports Stripe within a wider payment and billing architecture. Orb offers a focused usage-native revenue design platform for teams that want Stripe Payments to remain in place while raw usage events, pricing simulation, dimensional pricing, invoicing, and finance workflows run through Orb.

7. Schematic

Schematic combines usage-based billing with product entitlements and feature management. Its billing model is closely integrated with Stripe and connects plan, pricing, usage, and access-control decisions.

Key capabilities

• Billing and entitlements: Schematic connects pricing and billing rules with product feature access and usage limits.
• Usage-based pricing models: Schematic supports pay-as-you-go, pay-in-advance, fixed-fee with overage, volume, graduated, and credit burndown models.
• Stripe integration: Schematic integrates bi-directionally with Stripe for customers, products, subscriptions, and billing workflows.
• Plan and feature management: Teams can manage plans, metered features, entitlements, overrides, and customer-specific access rules.
• Published plans: Schematic publishes Starter, Growth, and Enterprise packaging.

Organizational fit

Schematic fits product-led SaaS teams that want usage billing and product entitlements to operate together around a Stripe-centered billing workflow. Its feature-management model is useful when plan access, usage limits, and billing state need to stay closely coordinated.

Considerations for Stripe users

Schematic's scope centers on billing, usage, entitlements, and product access around Stripe. Orb's scope covers metering, pricing, subscriptions, invoicing, accounts receivable, revenue reporting, and finance integrations on top of retained raw usage events, making it well suited to teams that want a broader revenue design system while keeping Stripe Payments.

Why Orb stands out for usage-based billing

For Stripe users, the strongest billing architecture is not determined by metering alone. Usage pricing creates customer trust, revenue, engineering, and finance implications that compound as products and contracts become more complex. Orb brings those concerns together on a common raw usage events foundation.

Raw usage events preserve flexibility for corrections and historical changes

Orb's standard metering and ingestion path retains granular raw usage events so backfills and backdated changes can recalculate affected unfinalized billing. Issued invoices are preserved as historical records and corrected through auditable workflows such as credit notes, voiding, or reissuance. For sustained high-volume streaming workloads, Hosted Rollups can aggregate configured event streams during ingestion.

This supports common operational scenarios:

• Late renewals: Orb can backdate subscription changes so affected mutable billing state reflects the applicable contract terms, with finalized invoice corrections handled through auditable workflows.
• Late usage data: Backfills can incorporate usage that arrives after the original event window and update affected mutable billing state without requiring spreadsheet reconstruction.
• Contract amendments: Revised commercial terms can be applied with historical context while preserving an audit trail for invoice adjustments.

The value is broader than correcting a number. Finance can trace why a charge changed, Product can evolve pricing without losing historical context, and Engineering does not have to rebuild usage pipelines for every new metric definition.

Pricing simulation reduces rollout risk

Orb Simulations lets teams model pricing changes against actual historical usage before production rollout. Teams can compare scenarios, inspect customer-level impact, and estimate revenue outcomes using the same underlying usage data that powers billing.

This is particularly useful when pricing has become a cross-functional operating decision. Product can explore packaging, Finance can assess revenue impact, and leadership can evaluate pricing scenarios before customers are affected.

SQL-based metrics and dimensional pricing support complex monetization

Orb's billable metrics support built-in aggregations and custom SQL over raw usage events. That allows teams to define metrics based on counts, unique values, sums, averages, maximums, minimums, and more complex calculations.

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. This is useful for infrastructure, AI, and platform businesses whose commercial model depends on multiple attributes of the same underlying usage.

Finance workflows connect billing to the close

Orb's NetSuite integration creates standard NetSuite transaction objects, including invoices, credit memos, and customer deposits, rather than sending summary approximations. Orb also supports accounts receivable workflows, aging reports, dunning, revenue reporting, and finance integrations.

This gives Finance a clearer path from raw usage events to invoice line items and accounting records. As usage-based contracts add credits, commitments, amendments, and custom terms, that traceability reduces the amount of manual reconciliation required to explain billing and revenue.

Stripe integration preserves payment processor choice

Orb supports Stripe collection while managing the billing layer above it. Orb's migration guide states that Stripe customer records, tax configurations, and payment methods can remain intact when companies move billing workflows to Orb and keep Stripe Payments.

Following Adyen's acquisition of Orb, Orb states that it continues operating as a stand-alone product and that customers can continue using their preferred payment-processing partner. This gives teams a path to keep Stripe Payments while using Orb for usage metering, pricing, invoicing, corrections, and finance workflows.

One billing core supports organizational alignment

Usage-based billing problems often appear as cross-functional problems before they appear as software problems. Product wants to launch new pricing, Sales wants custom contract terms, Engineering owns usage instrumentation, and Finance needs invoices and revenue records that can be explained later.

Orb addresses that operating model by keeping metering, pricing, subscriptions, invoicing, accounts receivable, reporting, and finance integrations on one billing foundation. The result is a shared source of billing truth that supports pricing execution without turning every contract variation or pricing update into a separate engineering project.

Frequently asked questions

What is usage-based billing and how does it benefit SaaS companies using Stripe?

Usage-based billing charges customers according to measured consumption, such as API calls, tokens, compute, storage, transactions, or completed actions. Hybrid models can combine those variable charges with subscriptions, commitments, platform fees, seats, or prepaid credits. For SaaS companies using Stripe Payments, a dedicated usage billing platform can manage metering, pricing, invoice calculation, corrections, and revenue workflows while Stripe continues to process payments. This can align customer charges more closely with product consumption while giving the company a billing system designed for variable usage and contract complexity.

What key features matter in usage-based billing software?

The most important capabilities depend on the company's pricing model and operating complexity. Common requirements include reliable event ingestion, flexible aggregation, retention of raw usage events, hybrid pricing support, prepaid credits, backfills, backdated changes, pricing simulation, invoice auditability, customer usage visibility, and integration with payment processors and finance systems. For teams whose pricing changes frequently, the ability to reuse historical raw usage events for new metrics and simulations can be particularly valuable. For Finance, traceability from usage through invoice and accounting records is equally important.

How does usage-based billing software integrate with Stripe for payment processing?

There are two common patterns. A company can use billing products that are part of Stripe's own ecosystem, such as Stripe Billing and Metronome, or it can use an external billing platform that integrates with Stripe Payments for collections. Orb follows the second pattern. Orb handles metering, pricing, billing, invoicing, and related finance workflows while Stripe Payments can continue processing charges. Orb documents that existing Stripe customer records, tax configurations, and payment methods can remain intact in a Stripe Billing migration where Stripe Payments stays in place.

Can usage-based billing software handle dimensional pricing and prepaid credits?

Yes, depending on the platform. Modern billing systems support a range of models that can include dimensional pricing, prepaid credits, commitments, thresholds, overages, tiered rates, volume rates, and hybrid subscription plus usage structures. 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. Orb also supports prepaid credits, minimums, commitments, and credit drawdown workflows within its billing platform.

How does usage-based billing software support financial compliance and revenue recognition?

Usage-based and hybrid contracts can create accounting complexity because revenue treatment depends on contract terms, service periods, variable consideration, consumption, credits, and amendments. Billing systems can support Finance by preserving usage lineage, producing clear invoice records, maintaining auditable adjustments, and integrating billing data into revenue recognition and ERP workflows. Orb's NetSuite integration creates standard transaction objects that fit existing NetSuite accounting workflows. Orb also provides revenue reporting, accounts receivable workflows, and auditable billing records so Finance can connect raw usage events to customer charges and downstream financial operations.