With over sixty products, many flexible add-ons, and a commitment to providing transparency around usage to their customers, Vercel lacked a method of tracking and understanding their billable metrics and wasn’t able to scale with their billing provider. Billing was often a blocker to shipping products quickly. 

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Vercel started their evaluation with a load test to establish Orb’s viability and quickly realized how developer-first the platform’s support is. With Orb’s help, the team now has a structured way of understanding and charging using their billable metrics, enjoys better usage data stability, and relies on fewer contractors to run manual revenue reconciliation. Orb has removed pricing and billing as bottlenecks, empowering the engineering and product teams to ship faster.

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• Vercel ships products incredibly quickly—for which they can’t afford pricing and billing to be a bottleneck 
• They needed a billing partner that could handle extremely high volumes of usage data and provide a source of truth at scale, so they turned to Orb
• Now, the team can ship without being blocked by billing, gets unparalleled support, and is aligned on billing across the organization.
• The team decreased the time it takes to build and launch billing for new products by 80% and described the process as much easier than before thanks to Orb

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Dan Carter is the Director of Engineering at Vercel where, upon joining, he encountered challenges around billing. With over sixty products with complex SKUs, including complicated enterprise products, Vercel needed to build a consistent understanding of billable metrics and remove billing as a blocker to shipping products and features. So Dan set out to implement a billing solution to streamline, rather than get in the way of, shipping.

Redefining billing at Vercel

The team needed a billing solution that could handle custom company units, tiered pricing, credits, and many combinations of line items. They needed a Netsuite integration, a platform that would distinguish between raw and billable events, and the flexibility to modify subscriptions and offer custom pricing rates. 

Vercel also wanted to fully offload the data infrastructure responsibilities of usage tracking to their billing platform so product teams would only need to care about instrumenting products with raw usage. They termed this “ELT for billing” (as opposed to an ETL approach, which would require them to maintain data pipelines to pre-aggregate metrics and prevent them from offloading billing to a vendor). 

Nothing of this cross-functional complexity had been done at Vercel before, so the team had to evaluate the current state of billing, define an ideal state, and then build the bridge to get there with Orb. They started by mapping how billing affects other parts of the organization and how to coalesce engineering with operations to solve problems across the board. 

Beginning with a load test, Dan and the team threw 70% of proxy traffic into Orb. Then, with a successful data point showing Orb could support Vercel’s large load, they set out to garner internal support. During this period, Dan and the team realized how developer-first Orb is and saw the ROI of Orb’s support immediately. Soon thereafter, Vercel’s CFO asked to move all billing to Orb. 

Shifting billing culture, reducing staffing needs, and igniting engineering velocity

Since implementing Orb, Vercel has created a new structured way of thinking about billable metrics and shifted its overall billing culture. The team also benefits from better usage data stability. 

From a staffing perspective, Orb has reduced the team’s need to hire temporary staff to run manual reconciliation by 50% and removed the bottleneck previously posed by pricing. The team recently built and launched billing for a new product in three weeks and described the process as much easier than before thanks to Orb. Orb also provides Vercel with the flexibility to adapt billing after launch, enabling the team to stay nimble and collaborate beyond the moment they ship a feature or product.

In the future, the team plans to roll out usage notifications, invoicing, and revenue recognition on Orb soon and expects to see better reporting, cross-functional alignment, and velocity overall as a result of their partnership with the team.