Modern billing is changing because the market has changed. Pricing has moved away from seat-heavy models toward usage-based approaches, especially in AI where costs and value track consumption. The pace of AI development has introduced new pricing models almost overnight, forcing companies to iterate and evolve pricing quickly to keep pace. This new reality requires new tools and approaches to pricing software.
Orb and Schematic are startups building tooling to meet these evolving market requirements. While they share some common ground, their approaches differ in both philosophy and functionality.
Orb is a usage-based billing platform focused on metering and invoicing at scale. It excels at high-volume scenarios, making it particularly well-suited for infrastructure companies like Supabase. At its core, Orb ingests product usage events and generates detailed invoices based on complex calculations. Companies choose Orb when they need industrial-strength usage-based billing that can handle significant scale and complexity.
Schematic takes a broader approach as a complete monetization platform built on top of Stripe billing. It specializes in managing entitlements, enabling rapid pricing and packaging iteration across multiple models (credits, tiers, etc.), and providing polished customer-facing components like portals and pricing pages. Schematic centralizes pricing and packaging control in a single interface, eliminating the need for developers to write billing code while giving business teams the ability to adjust monetization strategy continuously, whether across their entire customer base or for individual accounts. Companies choose Schematic when they need the agility to support hybrid billing models, trials, credits, usage tracking, custom deals, and expansion triggers all in one unified system.
To make these differences concrete, we'll examine how Orb and Schematic support the work of four key teams: engineering, GTM, product, and operations.
Here's a quick, practical snapshot of how the differences show up for engineering, GTM, product, and operations. It's an at-a-glance view: Orb requires a billing engineering team for ongoing implementation and maintenance, while Schematic takes that work off your plate with a complete platform.
Orb was both too much for us and not enough for us. -- Nejc Drobnič, Flashnet
Team | Orb | Schematic |
Engineering | Event ingestion and SQL metrics with granular control; billing engineers build gating, paywalls, portal, and upgrade flows around it. Time to value: weeks to months. | Entitlements enforce access in code; implement once, then pricing changes happen without engineering effort. Drop-in components eliminate the need for a billing engineering team. Time to value: days. |
GTM (PMM, Sales, CS) | Broad range of pricing models supported; every pricing change requires billing engineering time to implement. Time to change pricing: weeks. | Plans, limits, trials, add-ons, and overrides configurable via UI without engineering. Pricing table and upgrade paths update without deploys so experiments move fast. Time to change pricing: immediate. |
Product (PM, Design, UX) | Sends signals (webhooks/alerts) to track usage limits; billing engineers implement enforcement patterns and the upgrade experience. Time to monetize: weeks | A single runtime check answers "can this user do X right now?", incorporating plan logic, usage limits, and per-customer overrides. No billing engineering team needed. Time to monetize: days |
Ops (Finance, RevOps, FinOps) | Detailed usage invoices (tiers, dimensions, day-by-day) plus exports to ERP; billing engineers still build the buyer-facing billing UX. Support effort needed: a full migration | Keep Stripe for invoices, payments, and tax; Schematic syncs plans/usage to Stripe and ships portal/checkout out of the box. No billing engineering team needed. Saves a painful migration off Stripe. |
Orb. Engineering owns most of the stack, effectively requiring a dedicated billing engineering team. You define the event schema and ingestion details (ordering, idempotency, backfills), then express billable metrics in SQL. You also build all the product-facing pieces using Orb's webhooks, such as feature gating and paywalls, a customer portal, and upgrade flows. When pricing changes, your billing engineers coordinate updates from metrics to prices to invoice presentation. Orb provides full control every step of the way, but for most teams, that translates to weeks or months of billing engineering work before a new model is fully live, plus ongoing maintenance.
Schematic. Engineering integrates a lightweight SDK to check entitlements at runtime, no billing engineering team required. The buyer-facing surface (customer portal, checkout, pricing table) ships with the platform, so you're not building or maintaining billing UI. Pricing logic is configured in Schematic rather than in code. Pricing changes take effect in your product automatically without a deploy, freeing your engineering team to focus on core product work rather than billing infrastructure. This shortens the path to value from weeks to days.
Orb. GTM can configure products, prices, and versions in the catalog, but nearly every change requires engineering to implement in the product. Changes to pricing pages, plans, limits, in-app upgrade prompts, and trials all require coding, testing, and deployments. This dependency on engineering creates bottlenecks that slow down pricing iterations. That level of control suits complex, finance-driven catalogs at infrastructure-scale companies with dedicated billing engineering teams, but most teams struggle with the pace and coordination overhead.
Schematic. GTM manages plans, limits, trials, add-ons, promotions, and per-customer overrides directly in the UI, without engineering needed for pricing changes. Pricing tables and upgrade paths reflect changes without a deploy, and in-app enforcement picks them up automatically. The result is shorter cycles from idea to experiment to live, less coordination overhead, and a steadier cadence for running pricing tests or sales motions without draining engineering resources.
Orb. Your team works with engineering to implement enforcement and upgrade paths. That puts more on product, design, and engineering to set standards for limit states, warnings, soft caps, hard stops, and how usage context appears. The flexibility is high, but it requires a maintained billing component library, clear design guidelines, and regular testing after catalog changes.
Schematic. Runtime entitlement checks run in the product, so quotas and caps are enforced automatically without custom billing code. That supports PLG by giving product teams direct control over pricing levers without waiting on engineering deployments. The built-in billing components—pricing table, checkout, and customer portal—reflect plan logic and pricing updates automatically, which eliminates bespoke flows and keeps patterns consistent across the customer journey.
Orb. Finance teams get detailed usage invoices with tier and dimension breakdowns and, when needed, day-by-day summaries. Exports flow cleanly to accounting and analytics systems, which helps reconciliation and reporting. However, your engineering team still needs to build and maintain the buyer-facing billing experience: the portal, invoice access, payment methods, and upgrade links. When metric definitions or pricing change, plan on coordinating with billing engineers to review invoice presentation and update internal workflows to keep reports aligned.
Schematic. Stripe remains the system for invoices, payments, and tax, while Schematic syncs plans and usage into Stripe automatically. The customer portal and checkout are included out of the box, which eliminates the need for engineering to build these components. This reduces the surfaces you maintain and lowers support load for common tasks like updating payment details or viewing invoices. It keeps ops work inside the tools your team already uses and avoids a painful migration off Stripe.
Both platforms support usage-based pricing, plan versioning with safe migrations, credits and overages, alerts and webhooks, and exports for downstream reporting. Both can run complex catalogs. The practical difference is who builds and maintains the billing experience: whether you need a dedicated billing engineering team (Orb) or you want that work taken off your plate (Schematic).
Default to Schematic if:
You run payments and tax on Stripe and want pricing changes to appear in the product without a deploy.
You want built-in buyer experience components and automated enforcement of limits without building them yourself.
You do not have a dedicated billing engineering team, or you prefer to spend that engineering capacity on core product work rather than billing infrastructure.
Choose Orb if:
You require complex, multi-dimensional metrics defined in the billing system.
Finance needs deep control over customer invoices such as tiers, dimensions, and day-by-day summaries.
You have a dedicated billing engineering team and want to invest their capacity building and maintaining gating, paywalls, a customer portal, and upgrade flows.
If you are on Stripe, the most practical next step is to start with Schematic. Ship pricing changes into the product, enforce limits automatically, and keep invoices in Stripe without a migration, all without needing a billing engineering team. You can always add more complex metering later if and when you truly need it.
