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Orb pricing is organized into three layers: the product catalog and pricebook, plans, and subscriptions:
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The product catalog and pricebook are the foundation and source of truth for all your products and their prices. Everything else — plans, subscriptions, invoices, revenue reports, and downstream integrations — connects back to the products and prices in this layer. For detail on the other layers, refer to plans and subscriptions.

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What is a product?

A product is a representation of what you sell. It’s not necessarily a standalone offering, but a billable component of a larger product category (eg. “API Compute Units,” “Storage GB,” or “Premium Support”). In Orb, every price is attached to a product.  Beyond pricing and invoices, products are also how Orb categorizes and attributes revenue. Your finance team can slice revenue by product across Orb’s reports, making products the basis of accurate, auditable revenue reporting.

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Products and downstream integrations

Products also connect Orb to your external finance, tax, and accounting systems. The same product object that anchors your pricing also stores the mappings Orb needs to handle each line item downstream. When Orb syncs an invoice to an external invoicing provider like NetSuite, QuickBooks, Stripe Invoicing, or Bill.com, it uses the product’s invoicing provider mapping to match each invoice line to the correct item in that system. When Orb calculates tax through a provider like Anrok, Avalara, or Stripe Tax, it applies the right treatment to each line item based on the tax code configured on the product. You configure these mappings once per product, from the product details page. After that, every invoice for that product, across every plan and customer, flows correctly into your downstream systems automatically, without manual intervention. Conversely, if a product doesn’t have its external mappings configured, invoices that include it will fail to sync or be taxed incorrectly. You don’t need mappings in place before you start building in Orb, but you do need them before you go live with any integration. The setup guide for each integration walks through the mapping step for that provider. 

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What is a price?

A price defines how much and how a customer is charged for a given product: the rate, pricing model, currency, and cadence. Every price lives in your pricebook and can be referenced by multiple plans and subscriptions.
  • Price names appear on invoices. Name prices clearly and consistently, since whatever you name a price becomes the line item label the customer sees.                                             
  • Price edits are global. Because prices live in your pricebook independently of any single plan, a rate change made to a price propagates automatically to every subscription referencing it. No plan-by-plan edit is required.                                                             
A product defines what you sell. A price defines what it costs and how it’s billed. One product can have many prices, for example, different rates for different regions, contract tiers, or billing models. Price types and price models When you create a rice, the first thing you choose is the price type, which determines the billing logic that applies. Each price type supports different pricing models, the structure used to calculate the charge, such as unit, tiered, or bulk. Refer here for more detail on price types and pricing models.