The Future of AI Monetization: Announcing Orb Simulations

Why Pricing AI Agents is So Hard

The AI agent landscape is still sorting itself out, even within providers, as organizations don’t know how to value them yet. GenAI models are powerful, but pricing them effectively remains a challenge. Traditional SaaS models are outdated and don’t work because AI agents incur real-time compute costs per usage—each inference has a cost. Usage-based pricing is currently the most popular way forward, but outcome-based pricing may be a more promising model that enables companies to stand out and provide truly customer-centric pricing and lead the market. 

The challenge? Pricing experimentation in AI is slow, risky, and expensive. This is where Orb Simulations comes in.

Introducing Orb Simulations: A Smarter Way to Price AI

We built Orb Simulations to give SaaS and AI companies the ability to test, refine, and optimize pricing strategies before making costly decisions. Now, companies can model revenue scenarios on real-world product usage data—without disrupting live revenue streams, taking on risk, or relying on guesswork.

Orb Simulations is built on top of Orb’s powerful revenue intelligence engine that provides a unified data layer for product, usage, and pricing data. By using raw event data and pricing metrics, Orb Simulations enables companies to test pricing strategies in real time and ensures simulations are based on actual usage and evolving customer needs and market conditions. 

With Orb Simulations, companies can:

• Run side-by-side pricing simulations. Test different models and compare projected revenue impact before committing to changes. 
• Forecast long-term monetization strategies. See how different pricing structures affect customer retention, revenue expansion, and scalability.
• Reduce risk without slowing down. Launching a new pricing model shouldn’t mean gambling with revenue. With Orb Simulations, you get data-backed confidence.

The Changing Economics of GenAI

The economics of AI products are fundamentally different from SaaS, where businesses optimize for customer retention and expansion. With AI, businesses must optimize for cost per inference, model efficiency, and user behavior. And with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other providers continuously dropping their API costs, the pricing landscape is evolving fast.

Orb Simulations enables businesses to keep up. Instead of making pricing decisions in the dark, any company whose product incorporates AI can now run simulations that predict revenue outcomes under different monetization models—before rolling them out to customers.

Why AI Companies Need Better Monetization Tools

Most AI businesses struggle with two key challenges when it comes to pricing.

1. Pricing Experimentation is Costly: Today, launching a new pricing model means risking customer churn or revenue leakage. If you get it wrong, you could end up with unpredictable costs and unsustainable margins.

2. AI Monetization Needs More Precision: Many AI companies still base their pricing on gut feelings or competitor benchmarking rather than actual customer usage patterns. This leads to misaligned incentives and revenue loss.

Orb Simulations eliminates both. You can model and test multiple pricing strategies; usage-based, outcome-based, hybrid models - before making them live.

“We're adjusting our pricing to boost revenue from lower-usage customers while rewarding high-usage ones with tiered discounts. Orb Simulations gave us clear revenue projections and cost impacts, helping us make an informed decision.”  
_{– Alexandre Bouchard, CEO & Co-founder at Hookdeck}

‍The Future of AI Pricing Starts Here

Orb Simulations is just the beginning. This is the first product that truly demonstrates the power of Orb RevGraph—and it paves the way for even more advanced monetization capabilities.

With AI businesses evolving rapidly, companies that fail to iterate and optimize their pricing will fall behind. But those that harness the power of pricing intelligence and simulation will drive sustainable revenue growth—and lead the market.

Try Orb Simulations to discover your optimal pricing strategy. If you're building an AI-driven business and want to make sure you’re monetizing the right way, sign up for the waitlist.