Orb’s goal in the cloud marketplace ecosystem is to provide a single place to send usage events data, as well as to manage pricing and packaging evolution. This approach means that the way your operational teams manage plans and subscriptions do not have to differentiate between cloud marketplaces and native channels. Additionally, Orb provides a single place to query current usage and pricing information regardless of where your customer is processing payment.

​
Pricing for marketplace subscriptions

By default, setting up a cloud marketplace requires that you re-build your product catalog as a vendor on each platform (i.e. list your plan and pricing information for each dimension, such as storage or compute pricing). This approach limits your business in a few important ways:
  • Changing your pricing or setting up custom negotiated deals must be mediated by marketplace teams, which often manually approve terms.
  • It’s difficult or impossible to achieve billing automation if your pricing model is not natively supported by the marketplace platform (e.g. tiering configurations).
  • It can be difficult to provide a consistent experience for customers when platform functionality differs.
Orb does not rely on cloud marketplaces for attaching pricing information to your usage. Instead, we recommend that you set up a single metric when configuring your offering, which represents the total number of cents that you will charge a specific customer for your service. With a single dimension in place, Orb works with a marketplace reporting partner (see below) to provide usage data to the marketplace. This data is used to generate invoices and reports for your customers.

​
Reporting through partners

Orb works with other vendors as first-party integrations, including Clazar, Suger, and Tackle. These integrations will natively pull usage data out of the corresponding Orb subscription and report on a regular basis to the cloud marketplace, with robust handling for all the billing features that Orb offers. We’ve worked with these teams to ensure proper handling of changes to the subscription lifecycle — whether that happens through Orb or triggered by the marketplace. These specialized marketplace vendors allow you to co-sell with the marketplaces and provide dedicated marketplace-specific analytics and CPQ. These integrations can significantly speed up the time to listing on the marketplaces. Please reach out to the Orb team to understand recommendations for your specific billing setup, and currently available vendor integrations.