Architecture principles
Orb’s architecture is built with the following principles in mind:
- Accurate and auditable: Orb gives you the visibility to trace how each event contributes to your billing process. The platform is designed to be resilient to failure scenarios through the use of audit-safe amendments.
- Built for real time scale: Orb’s event-based APIs, such as event ingestion, are designed to handle extremely high throughput and scale with concurrent load. Orb also provides a real-time event balance and a highly performant webhooks architecture.
- Flexibility at the forefront: Orb places a core focus on the extensibility of the platform, providing a custom SQL metrics layer and a custom pricing platform.

Integrating with Orb
Orb is designed to be quick to integrate, with an available sandbox to test the platform’s functionality. The overall structure of the integration involves:
- Ingesting events and building your metrics. With these pieces in place, Orb can consume an event stream and automatically keep usage quantities up to date.
- Setting up your plans and pricing in a product catalog. This step associates your metrics with your business motion and pricing model.
- Provisioning subscriptions for each of your customers, so you can track usage in real time. Tracking the subscription lifecycle and accrued usage through Orb gives you a better window into account health and creates new opportunities for revenue growth.
- Configuring invoicing and payment, which allows Orb to automatically process charges and issue invoices on your behalf. This eliminates manual data entry and streamlines communication with your customers.