Orb

I sat down with Kshitij Grover on the Orb podcast to talk through how Cloudflare Emerging Tech and Incubation team runs. I have loved working with a team that builds products from the bottom up, shares them for free, and iterates. We take a lot of big shots, and failure is ok. At the end of the day, our goal is inventing the future of the Internet. And thanks, Kshitij, for the chat! https://lnkd.in/g3kWkgfw

We're excited to share that Stainless is an Orb customer. We look forward to powering their billing infrastructure as they help customers generate best-in-class SDKs.

Following the launch of Orb’s financial reporting module, the team has been hard at work making enhancements that are sure to delight finance and accounting teams. Product updates include new features to streamline the revenue accounting process, improve invoice clarity, and enable more granular revenue analysis and forecasting. Catch the latest here: https://lnkd.in/gnyFzehH

Orb is, without a doubt, entirely a team venture. And we’re looking for ambitious people to join us. I often think about when the Orb team went to Sausalito for a team offsite. We drifted around the Bay. It was perfect. We sailed for hours and went at a few dozen miles. And, honestly? We learned way more about each other in those hours than we had in the last 2 months. It sounds cliche, but sailing’s a great metaphor for teamwork. Every role on the boat is important and you absolutely need to work together, or else you’ll get soaked. We’re all very different people from different backgrounds with different talents, but that only added to the camaraderie of the day. And that’s a good way to view Orb: you can be yourself here. Sound interesting? Take a look at our site. Shoot us a message and let’s see what floats.

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!