Orb

Yesterday, Arsh Khandelwal and I talked at LinkedIn HQ about Orb's technical investment around Orb's alerting features at the scale of 1M+ events/sec. This is an incredibly important feature for Orb's customers to provide timely notifications to *their* customers on hitting a spend cap or usage limit → your customers don't like surprise overages, you don't want to swallow spillover infra costs for excess use. What makes implementing real-time alerting for billing hard? Why isn't this a solved problem a la Datadog? A preview of what's tricky: - Flexibility: Orb is the only billing system that lets you configure your billing metrics with SQL. This makes computing incremental query results significantly harder; traditional stream processing approaches don't work out of the box. Approximates aren't good enough... and remember that the number of groups explodes here quickly since each customer on each timezone has a different timeframe you're evaluating. - Business complexity: usually, your customers want to get alerted on accrued spend across all metrics they're subscribed to. You'll need to factor in a combination of credit burndown for some metrics, rollovers, minimums, tiered pricing, etc. This is a lot of domain data to load in a perf-critical path. Billing doesn't operate on a single p x q anymore. - Varying requirements: You might want to alert on a subset of self-serve, high risk customers with a much higher SLO than your trusted enterprise accounts. Being able to fast-lane some customers is critical.

Next, we have Evan Kiser, who joined Orb on the Customer Experience Engineering team in March. Here's what Evan shared on why he joined Orb. "I am thrilled to be a member of the team at Orb, where we're building products to help businesses evolve their billing and monetization strategies. As part of the customer experience team, I am incredibly excited to help develop a world-class customer support operation, guiding customers from initial implementation throughout their journey with Orb. Orb's product is used by leaders in finance, sales, and engineering, and getting to interact with and assist these diverse stakeholders is both exciting and rewarding. Our team at Orb is exceptionally talented, and I am eager to see what we will accomplish together." We're hiring! Check out our open roles here: https://lnkd.in/d46pzxJY

We're back with some spotlights on folks who joined the Orb team this year, and up next is Scott Bass on our Infrastructure team. Scott joined us earlier this year, and we'll let him share why he decided to join Orb (and specifically the Infra team): "I joined Orb as an Infrastructure Engineer to tackle interesting infrastructure and scaling challenges. I thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative environment and look forward to contributing to a team that values innovation and efficiency!" If you want to work with Scott, you're in luck! The Infra team is hiring—check out the job description here: https://lnkd.in/gADJFtkK

Orb has been recognized in IVP's Enterprise AI 55 list, highlighting innovative solutions recommended by operators for operators. We're thrilled to be among great companies pushing the boundaries of innovation in the CFO office.

From the Orb podcast with Neil Jagdish Patel: It's unique that Axiom has done so much core technical work -- building their own high-throughput ingestion system, storage layer, and query engine. 👇🏽 Full episode: https://lnkd.in/gU66v8sz

How are the top SaaS companies changing their pricing in 2024? PricingSaaS and Orb teamed up together to find out. Some valuable takeaways from our benchmarks report: - 12% of the ~400 companies in our dataset changed their pricing in Q1, while 46% changed their packaging. Example: Xero ran a "90% off" sale. - The mention of "AI" on pricing pages increased by 15% from Jan 1 to March 31st. - 52% of companies surveyed had some element of usage-based pricing - with consumption being the most popular usage metric. Read the full report in the comments, and thanks to John Kotowski and Rob Litterst for their partnership on this!

Such a fun conversation - here's Neil Jagdish Patel from Axiom on the Orb podcast talking about how important it is to not lose data, and the value of history. Wide events FTW! Full episode linked below 👇🏽

📣 We are thrilled to announce a new name and new flexible pricing plans for our database-as-a-service: YugabyteDB Aeon! 🚀 YugabyteDB Aeon A - Always On Availability E - Elastic Scalability O - Operational Simplicity N - NoSQL and SQL Compatibility The new pricing plans are designed to help you get started and optimize your cost based on only the features that you need. Special shout-out to our friends at Orb for the wonderful collaboration! https://lnkd.in/gaMvfW37 ❇ Try Now For Free! https://lnkd.in/gzdGZQWq 🗞 Read our blog to learn more: https://hubs.la/Q02D1GGs0 #yugabytedb #YugabyteDBAeon #postgresql #cassandra #distributedsql #database #rdbms #dbaas

📣 Introducing: Orb Reporting We’re thrilled to launch our new reporting module for finance teams! Orb Reporting helps you:   1️⃣ Streamline the revenue recognition and month-end close process 2️⃣ Get visibility into billings, recognized, and deferred revenue 3️⃣ Drill down into invoices with granularity - down to the usage event 4️⃣ Understand the financial health and performance of your business with the pivots and filtering your team needs No more manual 1000-tab spreadsheet wrangling. Orb Reporting solves the key challenges faced by finance teams when tackling complex pricing structures. Read more about how Orb Reporting increases efficiency and visibility and our new Customer Advisory Board in the comments.

Orb is thrilled to welcome Hookdeck as a new customer and support them as they build their Event Gateway to help teams process events from external systems.