• After expanding their product offering, Dune needed to evolve its pricing, but its existing billing solution made it practically impossible to switch to a usage-based model. 
• Using Orb, the team at Dune has released several iterations of their usage-based pricing model, allowing them to launch features and products faster while updating pricing information simply and quickly. Now, the team can make pricing changes on Orb and trust that users will have a seamless billing experience with no surprises.
• By partnering with Orb, Dune has evolved its pricing several times, making changes quickly and effectively without drawing on engineering resources. 
• Dune can provide a better experience to its users and the crypto community by making billing clear, reliable, and predictable for users.

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Dune started with a simple, binary pricing model of free and paid users, which helped them determine product-market fit. While their main focus is for Dune to benefit their whole community—including free ones—they charge users to use their API and run queries on their app. 

Eventually, they discovered the model was too simple: some users were priced out, and others were being undercharged.

The value of a flexible billing partner

Dune began using Stripe for billing but quickly realized it couldn’t support the pricing structure they wanted to build. They realized their need to implement usage-based pricing and find a billing partner to support that shift.

The team turned to Orb to handle all of their billing needs so that they could focus on evolving Dune’s pricing strategy and shipping features faster.

The ongoing evolution of Dune’s pricing 

Since partnering with Orb, Dune has undergone two major pricing changes. They launched their first version of usage-based pricing in November 2022, which expanded to more customer segments. The pricing model included four pricing tiers, each with corresponding usage allocations and limits. 

When they later released the Dune API, they simplified pricing to two paid tiers and a credits-based plan. Before, if someone signed up for multiple plans, they’d be billed separately. Today, using Orb, every customer gets just one invoice—simplifying their experience and creating transparency around billing.

Billing flexibility helps Dune launch features and iterate faster

Since rolling out Orb, Dune has been able to prioritize faster feature launches and implement pricing changes rapidly instead of focusing on billing. They have also avoided investments in expensive code or logic changes that would slow their team down.

The power of billing infrastructure in the day-to-day

Bernat uses Orb on a regular basis to better understand billing at Dune. He relies on Orb to get an accurate picture of the microstate of Dune’s billing, often examining their enterprise customers and key metrics, like when bills are paid or overage is incurred.

Dune’s Application product team executes pricing changes on Orb without relying on engineering bandwidth to do so. Orb’s flexibility enables them to make scheduled and immediate plan changes for customers, to continue evolving pricing.

As Dune’s pricing shifted to usage-based pricing, its subscription billing solution couldn’t adapt as the product team needed. Thanks to its flexibility, Orb has become Dune’s trusted billing partner as the crypto data company continues to launch features and products—all while fine-tuning and evolving its pricing strategy without expending its engineering resources.