New in the Orbit: product updates from October

Orb has rolled out several significant improvements to help you manage subscriptions with greater flexibility and control. We're excited to announce key updates that give you more power over trial periods, invoice timing, and plan versioning. These enhancements are designed to help you manage customer relationships more effectively, whether you're extending a trial period to close a deal, coordinating access with payments, or implementing granular pricing controls.

Let's dive into the details of what's new.

Trials improvements 

Trial periods are an effective lever in product-led and sales-led GTM motions. Orb's capabilities for managing trials just got a big upgrade. We've added a new API endpoint, Update Trial, that allows you to change or extend the end date of a subscription's trial. Orb will only shift the trial end date by default, leaving the rest of the subscription unchanged. You can also specify an option to shift the rest of the subscription by the same duration.

With this new endpoint, it's possible to retroactively extend a trial after it has already ended—if you need to give a prospect a few extra trial days to convert, Orb makes this configuration easy. When creating a new subscription or scheduling a plan change, you can override the trial duration.

Managing trials in the dashboard is as easy and powerful as managing them via the API. In the subscription card, use the "Update trial" action to adjust the trial period.

Immediately issue invoices 

If your customer has a mid-cycle seat true-up or upgrades their plan, you might consider giving them access to the associated product changes after payment. This ensures your risk is covered and you can still deliver a good product experience, provided you can quickly issue the relevant invoice. 

Orb now supports this use case with a new parameter in the issuance endpoint that allows you to issue a specific draft invoice synchronously. You can use this parameter for draft invoices that meet a set of criteria outlined here. Issuing an invoice could trigger side effects, some of which could be visible to customers (e.g. sending emails, auto-collecting payment, syncing the invoice to external providers, etc).

Select plan version in subscription creation 

When you create a subscription or change a customer’s plan, Orb assigns the default prices for that plan. Occasionally, you might want a new subscription or plan to start on a set of prices that are not marked as default - for example, you might do this if you haven’t published your new prices broadly yet or if you want a customer to start on a legacy price point.

In Orb, you can now select the plan version in the subscription create or plan change workflow to enable this. This functionality is also available in the API via the plan_version_number field in the create subscription endpoint and the schedule plan change endpoint. If the field is null or absent, the default version will be used.

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