8 SaaS pricing best practices with concrete examples
Eight practices with examples, from understanding the customer base to free plans generous enough to attract users and limited enough to prompt an upgrade.
All pages
How pricing works.
Orb's guides, docs and product pages on the mechanics behind the pages in the atlas: commitments, prepaid credits, spend controls and changing prices.
Choosing a pricing model
8 SaaS pricing models: how to choose one
Orb's CEO on the main SaaS pricing models, from flat rate and per seat to usage-based and hybrid, how each structures the way customers pay, and how to choose among them.
An expert's guide to enterprise pricing for SaaS
Orb's CEO on enterprise pricing: how it differs from SMB pricing, the main enterprise models, and what to weigh when prices are set deal by deal.
Build a pricing and packaging strategy in 9 steps
Nine steps from knowing the market and the buyer to packaging: who each plan is for, what separates the plans, and how the lineup scales with the customer.
How to build a usage-based pricing model
Orb's ebook on building a first pricing model: the key decisions and the frameworks for making them.
Usage-based pricing
14 usage-based pricing examples
Fourteen companies that charge for use, what each one meters, and a plain definition of usage-based pricing.
Migrating from subscriptions to usage-based billing
Moving a cloud product from flat monthly plans to billing for compute, storage and bandwidth: why customers' different consumption makes the case, and how to plan the change.
Pay-as-you-go pricing for SaaS
Pay-as-you-go for growing SaaS companies: a lower barrier to entry, revenue that scales with use, and the common ways to structure it.
Pricing AI
How to price your AI agent: a framework
The AI pricing paradox, where every use carries a compute cost, and a framework for picking a model that keeps margins healthy as usage grows.
Pricing AI agents: plans, costs and monetization models
Orb's CEO on four B2B models for pricing AI agents, how teams meter work that comes per call, token and event, and a framework for launching.
Pricing an AI agent
A worked example of token-based pricing: monthly grants, top-up purchases, expirations that keep liabilities bounded, and usage events sent raw so pricing stays separate from the product.
What is outcome-based pricing?
What it means to charge for results, how that differs from charging for usage, and how companies like Zendesk price AI agents by the outcome.
Commitments and prepaid credits
An AI founder's guide to prepaid credits
Orb's CTO on the choice between committing a dollar amount and buying custom credits, how commitments earn a better rate per credit, and how usage past a commitment bills at an overage rate.
Configuring plans: minimums and plan phases
How Orb represents a commitment to a dollar amount as a minimum, adding the difference to the invoice when usage falls short, and how plan phases step committed spend up on a schedule.
Prepaid credits
Selling credit balances that customers draw down: how credit rates and the credit model behind them shape where value is captured, from plans built on credit allocations to bulk discounts on larger commitments.
Spend controls and visibility
Experience Kit
Pricing calculators, usage dashboards and checkout flows built on one source of pricing truth, so customers can plan spend and see the value they get.
Invoicing
Invoices with real-time usage detail that customers can follow and finance teams can reconcile, as prices and metrics change.
Spend controls
Alerts, workflow triggers and dashboards that keep usage visible and predictable for customers, so usage pricing comes with no surprise bills.
Changing your pricing
Price evolution
Simulating a price change, rolling it out in a way customers can plan around, and keeping checkout and the rest of the stack in step.
Price modeling
Modeling the pricing logic a company wants, from dimensional rates to hybrid plans, and changing it without re-engineering billing.
Simulations
Testing pricing changes against real product usage data to predict their outcome before they ship.
Pricing by company
Calendly pricing: Features and plans explained
Orb's guide to Calendly pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs.
Canva pricing plans and cost breakdown for 2025
Orb's guide to Canva pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs.
Fly.io pricing: Plans and cost breakdown for 2025
Orb's guide to Fly.io pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs.
Mailchimp pricing: Features and plans explained
Orb's guide to Mailchimp pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs.
OpenAI pricing: Features and plans explained
Orb's guide to OpenAI pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs.
Pinecone pricing: Features and plans explained + how they built it
Orb's guide to Pinecone pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs, and how the billing behind it was built.
Shopify pricing: Features and plans explained
Orb's guide to Shopify pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs.
Stripe pricing breakdown: Fees, features, & plans in 2025
Orb's guide to Stripe pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs.
Webflow pricing: Features and plans explained
Orb's guide to Webflow pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs.
Zapier pricing: Features and plans explained
Orb's guide to Zapier pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs.
Zoom pricing: Features explained and how they built it
Orb's guide to Zoom pricing: the plans, what each includes and what it costs, and how the billing behind it was built.