Deploy a custom price

Orb is a uniquely extensible billing platform, supporting any usage-based business. With this focus, Orb allows you to deploy your business model onto its data infrastructure, rather than limiting your implementation to a pre-defined set of constraints determined by our product roadmap.

Custom pricing platform

Orb natively provides an array of standard pricing models which are common across a wide range of usage-based businesses. These vary in complexity, from a linear unit price per quantity of usage to a tiered model, where a marginal unit can be cheaper than previous units. When the standard pricing models do not suffice for your use case, please contact the Orb team and we can help to unblock you.

Conceptually, a pricing function is anything which translates a quantity value like number of API calls to an amount that can be charged. These pricing functions are often unique to your customer relationship, and it can be a point of friction when your billing provider does not provide support for how you bill your customers. The input to a pricing function is usually a single aggregate value over a timeframe (e.g. a billing period), but some pricing functions require a value per event in order to calculate an overall amount.

Suppose our business offers storage services, and we want to charge our customers a different price based on their utilization, with the caveat that we’d like to enforce a maximum price which is different per tier. We’ll call this model the capped tiers model. Here’s how an specific pricing configuration might look for capped tiers:

Total storage utilization	Price per gb-hr	Maximum total price
0 Gb-hr - 20 Gb-hr	$5	$50
20 Gb-hr - 100 Gb-hr	$3	$100
100 Gb-hr +	$2	$300

Note that the notion of a maximum price per tier is not part of the pre-built tiering model with Orb, and in other billing systems you would not be able to implement capped tiers. To implement this custom model in Orb, two steps are required.

First we determine the configuration parameters for the pricing structure and the corresponding schema. Since we’d like to be able to set up many different prices which all conform to the capped tiers schema, we need to allow configuring a flexible number of tiers and two parameters per tier: the unit price, and a maximum total price. Orb has first-class UI and schema constructs in the pricing platform for the “tier” concept, which provide out of the box data entry validation for tier ranges.

We then need to implement the pricing function given a quantity and the price’s configuration parameters. In this case, simple pseudocode might look like:

def price(quantity: Decimal, capped_tiers_config: Config) -> MonetaryAmount:
        descending_tier_configs = sorted(capped_tiers_config.tier_configs, key=tier_config.min, reverse=True)
        for tier_config in descending_tier_configs:
             if quantity >= tier_config.min:
                 return min(tier_config.max_total, tier_config.unit_price * quantity)
        return 0

Once this pricing model has been deployed on to the platform, it’s treated like a pre-built pricing function:

1. The pricing model is available for existing and new plans, and is configurable via the Orb UI. For the example above, non-technical users could create and modify plans with custom tier configurations without any other setup.
2. Similar to any other price, a custom price’s configuration can be modified when creating a subscription to represent custom deals.
3. Orb will run your pricing function code to generate alerts as well as usage graphs for each Customer.