Manual billing consumed time and restricted Rill’s tracking abilities. When Rill expanded to cloud marketplaces, making pricing plan changes took too long and limited their ability to experiment and scale.

Orb provides Rill with the flexibility and customization to bill for its cloud market integrations easily. Now, the team can focus on its product, driving growth, and experimenting with pricing—without worrying about marketplace constraints or the billing process.

• Manual billing took time and resources, and cloud marketplace requirements limited the ability to change or experiment with pricing
• Building an in-house solution would take months of engineering resources, which should be focused on building products
• Orb provides Rill with flexibility, customization, and valuable customer insights

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Rill’s pricing has always been usage-based and relies on its own unit of measurement, a blended model of the CPU, memory, and disk used for ingesting and querying data on its platform. Initially, the team ran manual queries, built spreadsheets, and created bills one at a time. This consumed their time and provided no way to track billing over time.

Integrating with cloud marketplaces and a need for flexibility

As Rill grew and began integrating with cloud marketplaces—a key sales and growth strategy—the need for a more robust billing solution arose. Making pricing plan changes on partner marketplaces could take months, and as a growing startup, they relied on the ability to experiment to scale. These challenges stopped Rill from reaching more customers and offering the most up-to-date pricing through their marketplace listings. 

Rill’s number one need in a billing solution was flexibility—their pricing model constantly evolves in minor and major ways. They wanted a billing solution that would work through those changes and integrate with their existing (and growing) ecosystem.‍

The decision to build vs. buy

The team thought about building such a system in-house but doing so would take months away from their engineering team, whose focus should be Rill’s products.

When they discovered Orb, it provided flexibility, customization, and the ability to set up billing for their cloud marketplace integrations without any challenges.

Rill quickly rolled out Orb, integrating Orb’s metrics into their own platforms to provide their customers visibility into usage and billing—an added bonus that improves the customer experience.

Finding focus and saving time with streamlined billing

When a new customer is created in Rill, their metrics are automatically sent to Orb, where the team can view and monitor them in real-time. That customer data is integrated with Quickbooks, where invoices are created automatically. On Rill’s side, clients have access to Orb metrics and can see their cost to date each month, trends, insights, and more. 

As a result, Rill can focus on the problem it’s trying to solve for its users, and the engineering team now measures one metric around usage instead of dozens. The team has also cut hours of effort each month that Rill’s team used to spend creating invoices, outsourcing their invoicing to a third-party accounting provider. What took them hours each month now takes just a few minutes. 

What’s more, Rill can now track customer usage in a given period of time and respond to spikes or changes, which helps with sales by enabling Rill to share data with customers, drive transparency, and help them understand their future spending.