Modern SaaS and AI teams can’t treat billing as an afterthought. The right platform shapes how quickly you can iterate on pricing, enforce limits in-product, and recognize revenue. In fast-moving markets, turning pricing decisions into live product behavior is a competitive advantage.
Schematic and Orb share the belief that legacy billing is too rigid. Both aim to make pricing more flexible and manageable, but they differ in focus and execution. For most teams, the win is turning pricing decisions into live product behavior quickly.
Schematic focuses on speed and empowerment, helping GTM teams iterate quickly with drop-in components and entitlements built into the product experience on top of Stripe.
Orb is for when you truly need a billing power tool with invoice-centric billing, SQL-grade metricsm and finance-ready invoices/exports. You’ll need to build and maintain in-product gating, upgrade flows, and much of the buyer-facing UX.
What follows is a deeper dive into how Schematic and Orb approach modern billing, what their differences mean in practice, and guidance to help you decide which approach best fits your needs.
Below is a side-by-side that highlights each platform’s focus and what it means in practice for product, GTM, and finance.
Orb | Schematic | |
Primary focus | Event-based usage billing power tool (events → metrics → prices → invoices). | Enhance Stripe with usage based, product-layer monetization (plans, entitlements, limits, upgrade UX). |
Enforcement | Webhooks/alerts signal lifecycle/thresholds; teams build gating & paywalls themselves. | Smart Flags return access + usage + remaining limits in one check; easy to gate/upsell in-app. |
Metrics | SQL-grade billable metrics over raw events; complex aggregations & simulations. | Practical SaaS/AI meters tied to features (counts, quotas, credits/overages). |
Billing outputs | Detailed usage invoices (tier/dimension breakdowns, day-by-day usage) + exports to finance tools. | Leverages Stripe excellence in invoices, payments, and tax; Schematic syncs plan/usage + ships the UX. |
Customer & Dev Experience | DIY buyer UX (build portal, paywalls, upgrade flows) and wire webhooks/SQL metrics; powerful but more engineering to assemble. | Ships buyer-facing components (Customer Portal, Checkout, Pricing Table, metered paywalls) + SDKs/flags for enforcement; faster GTM, less bespoke UI. |
Time to value | Weeks–months to assemble the power tool: wire gating, portals, paywalls, and invoice presentation around the billing core. | Days to live pricing changes and enforcement with minimal code. |
Orb models usage and pricing over events and emits alerts/webhooks as customers approach or cross limits, but the enforcement is up to your application. You must build the gating, paywalls, and upgrade flows, and wire them to those signals.
Schematic bakes entitlements (features) into the product layer. Plans are defined by entitlements, and a runtime Smart Flag in your code checks them on each request. That means when a customer hits a limit, you can automatically gate the feature and trigger a paywall or upgrade flow (via drop-in components), closing the loop between pricing and product.
Orb defines billable metrics over raw events and lets you compute them with SQL, so you can encode multi-dimensional logic and run simulations before changes go live. The flexibility is real, but it asks for careful schema design and ongoing ownership from engineering and data teams.
Schematic ties meters to features and entitlements that customers actually buy: counts, quotas, credit burndown, and overages. Pricing logic lives next to product behavior, which keeps the catalog understandable and faster to ship.
Orb produces detailed usage invoices with tier and dimension breakdowns and even day-by-day summaries, then exports cleanly to finance systems. Finance gets deep control over invoices, but you still have build the buyer experience around it.
Schematic keeps Stripe as the engine for invoices, payments, and tax, while syncing plans and usage from the product layer. You get a polished portal and checkout out of the box, less custom reconciliation work, and fewer surfaces to maintain for most SaaS and AI teams running on Stripe. This saves you a painful migration off of Stripe.
Both platforms support versioned plans and safe migrations, which is great for complex catalogs and teams that experiment often. Orb’s approach leans toward complexity and customization—you’ll coordinate metric definitions, price objects, and invoice presentation to get granular control across dimensions and contract-specific terms.
Schematic lets GTM roll out updates in config. Stripe mapping is handled under the hood, and Smart Flags make those changes effective in-product immediately, turning pricing decisions into live behavior without another deploy.
Orb gives you the building blocks (event ingestion, SQL metrics, webhooks, and exports) and makes you assemble the rest, including gating, paywalls, upgrade flows, and any buyer-facing portal. This can be powerful if you want to own every detail, but expect ongoing maintenance and QA each time pricing changes.
With Schematic, you integrate once and ship a polished buyer experience. The SDK and a runtime Smart Flag enforce entitlements at the feature gate, while drop-in components (Portal, Checkout, Pricing Table) handle upgrades and billing. GTM can iterate without waiting for the next engineering sprint.
Orb and Schematic both reflect the new wave of billing platforms: easier to manage, more flexible to integrate, and better aligned with how SaaS and AI companies operate today.
The difference is emphasis:
Orb = invoice-centric usage billing: Event-based metering and invoicing with SQL-grade metrics plus finance-ready invoices/exports. Teams build the in-product gating, upgrade flows, and portal themselves. Best for power users with complex models and dedicated billing engineering (think Vercel, Supabase).
Schematic = speed and empowerment: Managed, Stripe-first, and product-integrated, with entitlements, runtime flags, and drop-in components that let business teams iterate pricing without code changes. Best for fast-moving AI teams who want billing to feel like part of the product and need to ship quickly (Zep, Plotly Cloud).
In short, if your priority is invoice fidelity and deep metric control (and you have a billing engineering team) Orb is a strong option. If your priority is velocity, in-product enforcement, and a polished buyer experience on Stripe, Schematic is the better fit.
