Usage-based pricing has become an important monetization model for software, AI, infrastructure, and developer products. As AI changes how software value is delivered, consumption-based pricing is becoming more relevant alongside subscriptions, credits, seats, and hybrid structures.
The challenge is choosing infrastructure that can capture product usage accurately, apply evolving pricing logic, generate invoices, and connect billing data with finance workflows as the business grows.
Key takeaways
- Usage metering and billing platforms differ in how they ingest events, define billable metrics, manage pricing, generate invoices, and connect with finance systems
- Orb combines raw usage events, flexible billable metrics, dimensional pricing, historical simulations, invoicing, and connected finance workflows
- Stripe Billing, Metronome, Chargebee, Maxio, and Zuora support different combinations of recurring and usage-based monetization
- Lago, Recurly, Amberflo, and m3ter take different approaches to open-source deployment, subscription management, real-time metering, and consumption billing
- Architecture, pricing flexibility, historical corrections, finance integrations, deployment model, and customer-facing usage visibility are important evaluation criteria
What to look for in usage metering and billing software
Usage-based billing requires more than collecting event counts. API calls, tokens, storage, compute, transactions, and other product activity need to become billable metrics that can be priced and carried through invoicing and downstream financial workflows.
Relevant capabilities include:
- Real-time usage metering
- Event deduplication and transformation
- Usage-based and hybrid pricing
- Dimensional pricing
- Prepaid credits
- Customer-specific commercial terms
- Backfills and historical corrections
- Pricing versioning
- Customer usage visibility
- Spend controls
- CRM and ERP integrations
- Invoicing and finance workflows
The appropriate platform depends on the product’s usage model, event volume, customer mix, pricing complexity, and the systems that need to consume billing information.
1) Orb
Overview
Orb is a revenue design platform for companies using usage-based, subscription, credit-based, seat-based, and hybrid pricing. Its architecture connects raw usage events with billable metrics, pricing, invoicing, customer experiences, and finance workflows.
The platform supports AI companies, cloud infrastructure providers, developer tools, and SaaS businesses where pricing needs to evolve alongside product usage.
Metering and pricing flexibility
Orb’s standard metering architecture retains raw usage events, giving teams granular data for billing calculations, historical analysis, backfills, and eligible backdated changes.
Key capabilities include:
- Custom SQL billable metrics
- Dimensional price groups
- Pricing simulations using historical usage
- Prepaid credits and commitments
- Usage-based, subscription, seat-based, credit-based, and hybrid pricing
Orb’s dimensional price groups support pricing across variables such as region, instance type, and environment within a single pricing configuration. Historical simulations let teams model proposed pricing against actual past usage before rollout.
Billing and finance workflows
Orb carries product usage and pricing data into enterprise invoicing, accounts receivable, collections, and revenue recognition workflows.
Salesforce and NetSuite integration connect billing with commercial and accounting systems, while customer-facing usage experiences provide visibility into consumption and billing activity.
Price evolution
Orb supports ongoing price evolution through customer-specific pricing, scheduled changes, billable metric updates, historical simulations, and pricing migrations.
This gives product, finance, and engineering teams shared infrastructure for evolving monetization as products, usage patterns, and customer agreements change.
Pricing and customer results
Orb uses custom pricing across Core, Advanced, and Enterprise plans. Pricing is based primarily on billings and event volume, with platform fees applying to Advanced and Enterprise tiers.
Adyen completed its acquisition of Orb on July 1, 2026. Orb continues operating as a stand-alone product and supports customers using their preferred payment-processing partners.
Customer results are specific to individual deployments. Vercel reduced engineering time required to launch billing for new products by 80%, while Stytch reduced time spent processing bills and invoicing by 75%. Supabase processes more than 1.5 million invoices per month through Orb.
2) Stripe Billing
Overview
Stripe Billing provides subscription and usage-based billing within the broader Stripe payments ecosystem.
It supports recurring, metered, and hybrid pricing while connecting billing with Stripe Payments and other products in the Stripe ecosystem.
Key capabilities
- Subscription billing
- Usage-based billing
- Metered usage
- Hybrid pricing
- Tiered and volume pricing
- Multidimensional rates
- Checkout and payment links
- Customer portal
- Stripe Payments integration
- Tax and revenue workflows
Pricing and fit
Stripe Billing currently offers:
- Pay as you go: 0.7% of billing volume
- Monthly: Starting at $620 per month under an annual contract
- Custom: Pricing for larger deployments
Stripe Billing can be relevant for companies already using Stripe that want billing and payment workflows within the same ecosystem.
Metronome is a separate Stripe product for more sophisticated usage-based billing and is not included automatically within standard Stripe Billing pricing.
3) Metronome
Overview
Metronome provides usage-based billing infrastructure spanning metering, pricing, enterprise contracts, billing, and revenue analytics.
Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome in January 2026.
Key capabilities
- Raw usage-event ingestion
- SQL-based billable metrics
- Centralized rate cards
- Usage-based and hybrid pricing
- Enterprise contracts
- Credits and commitments
- Streaming billable metrics
- Embeddable billing dashboards
- Salesforce integration
- NetSuite integration
- Cloud marketplace workflows
- Pricing and revenue analytics
Pricing and fit
Metronome publishes Startup pricing at:
- 0.8% of billing volume
- $0.04 per 1,000 ingested events
Its Custom plan uses individualized pricing for larger deployments.
Metronome supports companies with consumption-based products, high event volumes, negotiated contracts, and pricing models operating over granular usage data.
4) Chargebee
Overview
Chargebee provides recurring billing and subscription-management infrastructure across self-service, SaaS, and enterprise revenue models.
Its platform supports subscription, usage-based, and hybrid pricing alongside payments, revenue recognition, retention, and customer-management workflows.
Key capabilities
- Subscription billing
- Usage-based billing
- Hybrid pricing
- Tiered and volume pricing
- Revenue recognition
- Collections and dunning
- Multiple payment gateways
- Customer portals
- CPQ workflows
- API and MCP connectivity
Pricing and fit
Chargebee’s published pricing includes:
- Starter: $0 for the first $250,000 in cumulative billing, then 0.75%
- Performance: $599 per month for up to $100,000 in monthly billing, then 0.75%
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Chargebee supports businesses that combine recurring subscriptions with usage components and need broader subscription lifecycle and payment workflows.
5) Maxio
Overview
Maxio combines subscription and usage billing with financial reporting, accounts receivable, collections, and revenue-management capabilities.
The platform was formed through the combination of Chargify and SaaSOptics and primarily serves B2B SaaS finance workflows.
Key capabilities
- Subscription billing
- Usage-based billing
- Metering and rating
- Revenue recognition
- SaaS financial reporting
- Accounts receivable
- Collections and dunning
- Multi-entity support
- Consolidated invoicing
- Multiple payment gateways
Pricing and fit
Maxio currently publishes:
- Grow: $599 per month for up to $100,000 in monthly billings
- Scale: Custom pricing above that level
The platform can be relevant where billing, financial reporting, and recurring-revenue operations need to operate within the same finance-oriented environment.
6) Zuora
Overview
Zuora provides enterprise monetization infrastructure spanning subscriptions, usage-based pricing, billing, payments, revenue recognition, and related revenue workflows.
Its acquisition of Togai expanded its metering and rating capabilities for consumption-based pricing.
Key capabilities
- Usage metering and rating
- Subscription billing
- Hybrid pricing
- Dynamic pricing
- Prepaid balances
- Enterprise contracts
- Multi-entity operations
- Multi-currency billing
- Revenue recognition
- Collections
- CRM and ERP workflows
Pricing and fit
Zuora uses custom pricing rather than a standard public pricing structure.
The platform supports organizations managing multiple entities, currencies, commercial models, and enterprise revenue processes.
Zuora became a private company in February 2025 following its acquisition by Silver Lake and GIC.
7) Lago
Overview
Lago is an open-source billing platform supporting usage-based, subscription, prepaid-credit, and hybrid pricing.
Companies can self-host its AGPLv3-licensed Open Source edition or use its paid cloud and self-hosted offerings.
Key capabilities
- Usage-event ingestion
- Billable metrics
- Usage-based billing
- Subscription billing
- Hybrid pricing
- Dimensional pricing
- Prepaid credits and wallets
- Customer portal
- Invoicing
- Revenue analytics
- Payment-provider integrations
- CRM and ERP integrations
Pricing and fit
Lago’s Open Source edition has a $0 software license for self-hosted deployments.
Its paid offering uses custom pricing for managed cloud and commercial self-hosted deployments.
Lago can be relevant for engineering teams that want open-source access or control over where billing infrastructure is deployed. Self-hosting also places infrastructure, monitoring, upgrades, security, and operations within the deploying organization.
8) m3ter
Overview
m3ter developed metering, rating, pricing, and billing infrastructure for consumption-based monetization.
Salesforce completed its acquisition of m3ter on July 1, 2026.
Key capabilities
m3ter’s technology includes capabilities across:
- Usage-data ingestion
- Metering and rating
- Usage-based pricing
- Pricing configuration
- Contract billing
- Data enrichment
- Usage forecasting
- Customer-specific pricing
- Billing-data exports
Current status
m3ter is no longer generally available as a standalone product for new customers.
Its technology is being incorporated into Salesforce’s broader Agentforce Revenue Management strategy, with future availability centered on Salesforce revenue workflows rather than a separately purchased m3ter platform.
This status is important for companies comparing independently available usage-billing products in 2026.
9) Recurly
Overview
Recurly provides subscription-management and recurring-revenue infrastructure with usage-based billing, payment orchestration, retention, and revenue-recognition capabilities.
Usage-based charges can operate through metered components alongside recurring subscription plans.
Key capabilities
- Subscription management
- Usage-based billing
- Tiered and volume pricing
- Hybrid subscription structures
- Customer portals
- Dunning
- Payment recovery
- Multiple payment gateways
- Revenue recognition
- Reporting and analytics
Pricing and fit
Recurly’s Starter plan begins at $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of monthly billings included before the percentage fee applies.
Larger deployments use volume-based commercial pricing.
Recurly supports subscription businesses that need usage charges alongside recurring plans, payment workflows, and retention capabilities.
10) Amberflo
Overview
Amberflo provides usage metering, cost tracking, and billing infrastructure for consumption-based products, including AI, cloud, and API workloads.
Its platform connects usage data with pricing, customer-level cost attribution, invoicing, and spend visibility.
Key capabilities
- Real-time usage metering
- Usage-based billing
- Subscription and hybrid pricing
- Tiered and volume pricing
- Prepaid credits
- Cost attribution
- Customer profitability analysis
- Customer usage dashboards
- Spend alerts
- Automated invoicing
- Stripe payment collection
Pricing and fit
Amberflo currently publishes:
- Startups: $99 per month
- Growth: Starting at $599 per month
- Custom: Pricing for larger billing and event volumes
The platform supports businesses that want to connect usage metering with customer billing and internal cost analysis.
Why Orb stands out for usage metering and billing
Orb addresses a central challenge in usage-based billing: connecting granular product activity with pricing, invoices, customer visibility, and downstream finance operations.
Its standard architecture retains raw usage events, providing granular data for billing calculations, historical analysis, corrections, and customer-facing explanations while supporting billing accuracy.
Billing traceability and flexibility
Orb’s architecture supports:
- Backfilling and backdating: Apply eligible usage corrections and pricing changes to affected billing periods
- Finance-grade auditability: Trace billing calculations back to the underlying usage that generated the charge
- SQL-based metrics: Define billable metrics using flexible queries and aggregations
- Dimensional price groups: Price combinations such as region, instance type, model, and environment through a single pricing configuration
These capabilities allow billing logic to evolve while preserving the granular usage information underlying each calculation.
Pricing analysis
Teams can use price modeling to evaluate how pricing structures relate to product usage and commercial requirements.
Orb also supports historical pricing simulations, allowing proposed models to be evaluated against actual past usage before rollout. This gives teams visibility into customer-level and revenue-level effects before moving pricing into production.
Customer-facing experiences
Orb supports transparent usage experiences that can surface consumption, billing, and spending information directly within a product.
This helps keep customer-facing usage information connected with the same billing data used for invoicing and revenue operations.
Connected finance operations
Orb carries billing information into broader finance operations, connecting usage and pricing with invoicing, accounts receivable, collections, revenue recognition, CRM, ERP, and reporting workflows.
The result is shared revenue infrastructure across product, engineering, sales, and finance rather than separate systems for each stage of the billing lifecycle.
Enterprise readiness
Orb supports enterprise requirements around access controls, audit history, data protection, and security and compliance.
For AI products, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and SaaS businesses with complex usage models, this provides a revenue foundation that can evolve alongside pricing, customer contracts, and finance requirements.
Customer results illustrate how individual teams use the platform. Supabase processes more than 1.5 million invoices per month through Orb, while Vercel and Stytch have reported substantial reductions in engineering and billing-operations time.
These results are specific to each customer deployment rather than guaranteed outcomes.
Frequently asked questions
What is usage metering and billing software?
Usage metering and billing software captures product-consumption data, turns that activity into billable metrics, applies pricing rules, and produces the information needed for invoices and downstream finance workflows. Usage can include API calls, tokens, compute, storage, transactions, seats, or other measurable product activity.
What should companies compare when evaluating usage billing platforms?
Important factors include event ingestion, raw-data retention, billable metric flexibility, dimensional pricing, credits, historical corrections, pricing versioning, invoicing, customer visibility, payment integrations, ERP and CRM connectivity, security, and deployment requirements.
How does Orb support pricing changes?
Orb combines flexible billable metrics, dimensional price groups, customer-specific pricing, scheduled changes, historical simulations, and price-evolution workflows. Teams can model proposed pricing against real historical usage before rollout and carry approved changes through billing and finance operations.
Why do raw usage events matter for billing?
Raw usage events preserve the product activity underlying billable metrics. Orb’s standard architecture retains raw usage events, supporting traceability, historical analysis, backfills, metric changes, and eligible backdated billing adjustments.
Why consider Orb for usage metering and billing?
Orb connects raw usage events with flexible pricing, historical simulations, prepaid credits, invoicing, customer-facing usage experiences, and finance workflows. This gives product, engineering, and finance teams shared infrastructure for managing usage-based and hybrid monetization as products, pricing, and commercial requirements evolve.