New in the Orbit: product updates from February

It's February and we're back with a new round of product updates. Orb rolled out enhancements to prepaid credits, introducing credit allocations and top-ups. When it comes to billing, we’re big believers in the importance of delivering a transparent user experience. To support this, we launched a new API endpoint to enable you to display detailed breakdowns of usage and cost data to your customers, with powerful SQL-based filtering and grouping.

Allocations

Customers can now receive allocations of credits included as part of their subscriptions. Allocations can be configured in the plan creation flow and overridden on a per-subscription basis, with an amount, optional rollover behavior, and cadence.

Allocations control the recurring schedule of credit increments on the customer’s credit ledger. Because allocations are configured at the plan-level, Orb allows you to standardize credit treatment and ensure consistency across thousands of customers. Learn more here.

Top-ups

Automatically add to a customer’s credit balance when their balance reaches a certain threshold. When you set up a top-up, you can also set the cost-basis for the credits to ensure your customer is invoiced the correct amount.

Automatic top-ups are a useful feature if you’d like to ensure your customers always have enough of a credit balance to cover their usage, regardless of their subscription state. Learn more here.

Evaluate price API endpoint

Orb’s new Evaluate Price API endpoint was built to provide granular visibility into usage and costs. With unmatched expressivity, you can use this endpoint to build rich and interactive visualizations in your customer billing portal.

The endpoint allows you to filter and group by any property in usage events, to better understand attribution to specific dimensions. The set of filter and grouping expressions do not need to not be configured up-front or known to Orb; instead, you’re able to perform these queries on-demand.

You can even use multiple SQL expressions to dynamically query your data, just as you would use SQL expressions when creating billable metrics.

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Do you have any questions or feedback about these product updates? We’d love to hear from you.