How Alchemy handles billing at blockchain scale with Orb

About Alchemy

Alchemy is the complete blockchain developer platform, trusted by leading fintechs and developers worldwide to build and scale applications across 100+ blockchains. Its infrastructure moves billions at scale — powering more than $1T in transactions annually for companies including Visa, Circle, Stripe, Robinhood, Uniswap, and Polymarket. From NFT marketplaces and prediction markets to cross-border fintech and large institutions entering the space, Alchemy supports an increasingly broad and complex set of customer use cases on proven, industry-leading infrastructure.

Pain Points

As Alchemy scaled, usage-based pricing became central to how the business monetized. The company was moving into larger, more complex enterprise deals: highly customized contracts, bigger customers, and a growing range of workloads across an expanding set of chains. In that context, billing was no longer a back-office function; it was becoming a core part of the go-to-market motion, directly shaping how quickly and how flexibly Alchemy could close and serve its biggest customers.

Alchemy's original in-house setup — a usage pipeline maintained across engineering teams, paired with a separate subscription manager — had served the business well in its earlier stages. But as contracts grew more sophisticated and volumes climbed, that approach meant rising operational overhead and pulled valuable engineering time toward billing maintenance rather than the core platform. As deal complexity grew, billing risked becoming a bottleneck on the business rather than an enabler.

Solution

Alchemy adopted Orb to consolidate usage ingestion, invoicing, subscription management, and customer-facing spend controls into a single platform. Today, Orb sits at the cornerstone of Alchemy's revenue stack: every deal that originates in Salesforce flows into Orb, which powers invoicing, customer usage dashboards, and spend controls including alerts and limits. The shift reframed billing from an operational function into a lever for monetization strategy — supporting larger, more customized enterprise deals at higher scale.

Key Points

• As Alchemy's usage-based pricing grew more sophisticated, its in-house setup required increasing engineering investment to maintain
• After a rigorous evaluation across six vendors, Orb stood out for packaging usage ingestion, invoicing, spend controls, and low-latency performance into one system — backed by the most technically credible team in the process.
• Orb now powers Alchemy's full revenue motion, from Salesforce-originated deals through invoicing, customer dashboards, and spend controls.
• Self-serve configuration and a staging-like safety model let Alchemy ship and roll back pricing changes quickly, without relying on a vendor services team to operate.
• Reframing billing as monetization infrastructure has helped Alchemy support more complex enterprise contracts and unlock revenue with less operational friction.

Consolidating the revenue stack on one platform

Stas leads financial operations at Alchemy, owning the systems that move money through the business — from deal capture in the CRM through provisioning, billing, revenue recognition, and analytics, alongside the cost layer of what it takes to serve each customer. His day-to-day is the continuous improvement of those processes and the tech stack underneath them, tightening the loop with stakeholders to ship changes as quickly as possible.

Alchemy evaluated billing vendors against one core criterion: consolidation. Rather than running one tool for usage ingestion and a separate one for sending invoices — and spending engineering time connecting them — the company wanted a single system that handled everything out of the box. That requirement ran end to end across the revenue stack, from deal capture in the CRM through provisioning, billing, revenue recognition, and analytics, down to the cost layer of serving each customer.

Several vendors had individual strengths, like one with strong invoice customization, another with low latency. Orb came ahead by packaging that full feature set into a single platform. The deciding factor, though, was the team. Alchemy's engineering evaluation pointed to Orb as the most technically competent vendor in the running — built by people who understood usage-based billing deeply, not just sold it.

From operational function to a monetization lever

The biggest unlock wasn't a single feature — it was letting billing enable the business rather than constrain it. Previously, the effort required to structure billing for large, complex deals added friction to closing them. With Orb, Alchemy can structure deals around what the customer needs, not around what's easy to bill — which is why smoother billing became one of the most valued outcomes across the go-to-market team.

Alchemy prices primarily on compute-unit usage plus certain fixed components, with highly customized enterprise contracts on top. Orb gives the team a unified view of where value and margin come from across that model: more usage events, higher-tier features, and conditional capabilities layered onto enterprise deals. Alchemy validates those pricing decisions through accumulated usage, dollar retention, and direct renewal feedback — customers who renew specifically because new chains and capabilities now run through Orb.

Looking ahead

Alchemy continues to refine its pricing as its product surface expands, balancing the appeal of clean, consolidated compute-unit pricing against the need to price certain workloads differently. Orb's flexibility gives the team room to model and iterate quickly rather than committing to a structure they can't revisit.

Next, Alchemy is looking toward deeper financial accounting and revenue analytics inside Orb — pulling more of the close process and its entries into the same system that already runs billing. The throughline of the partnership is simple: Alchemy wants to reduce uncertainty across the organization, and Orb gives it the flexibility to move quickly while maintaining a single, trustworthy source of truth for revenue.