Best Usage-Based Billing Software
Kribana, Orb, Metronome, Chargebee, Stripe Billing, Lago and Zuora are the usage-based billing platforms most teams end up evaluating — from developer-first metering APIs to fully hosted billing surfaces to open-source cores you run yourself. This guide compares what each one actually is, where it fits, and — since two of the biggest names in the category are frequently cross-shopped — includes an honest, independent Orb vs. Metronome breakdown further down.
Usage-based billing software at a glance
| Tool | Category | Best for | Pricing | Standout |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kribana | Usage-based + credit billing | AI/SaaS teams billing on usage, credits, or a hybrid of both | Percentage of billed revenue — contact sales for your rate | An agent that acts after the invoice — recovery, top-ups, expansion |
| Orb | Usage-based billing | API-first infrastructure teams that own billing engineering | Custom, usage-based — not published | Strong metering and rating engine for high event volume |
| Metronome | Usage-based billing | High-scale infrastructure and AI platforms | Custom, usage-based — not published | Rating engine built for very high event volume — now owned by Stripe |
| Chargebee | Subscription billing | Subscription-first businesses adding usage | Flow plan: $0 base + 0.80% of invoiced volume, 100M events/mo included; Enterprise custom | Deep subscription management and dunning tooling |
| Stripe Billing | Payments-attached billing | Teams already fully committed to Stripe as processor | 0.7% of billing volume, 100M events/mo via the Meters API | The tightest possible integration with Stripe payments |
| Lago | Usage-based billing | Engineering-led teams that want an open-source metering core they control | Free and open-source if self-hosted; Premium (cloud or self-hosted) is quote-only | Full control over deployment and data residency |
| Zuora | Enterprise monetization | Large-enterprise order-to-cash and monetization | Custom enterprise licensing — not published; typically an integrator-led implementation | Deep order-to-cash and monetization tooling built for large-enterprise complexity |
How we evaluated: pricing-model flexibility, native credit/prepaid support, migration effort, and what (if anything) automates after the invoice is issued. Full head-to-head breakdowns for each tool against Kribana are linked below.
What actually separates these platforms
“Usage-based billing software” covers three genuinely different products wearing the same label. The first is a metering-and-rating API — Orb and Metronome are the clearest examples — built for engineering teams who want a strong, high-throughput ledger and are willing to build the customer-facing layer (portal, invoicing, dunning) themselves on top of it. The second is a fully hosted billing platform — Kribana and Chargebee — where pricing, portal and invoicing ship configured, and the trade-off runs the other way: less raw control over the internals, in exchange for a working product on day one. The third is infrastructure you run yourself, which is Lago’s open-source core, or a heavyweight enterprise suite built for order-to-cash complexity at large-company scale, which is Zuora’s category.
Credit and prepaid support is the other axis worth checking before you pick, especially for an AI product. Most platforms in this category were built metering-first and treat a credit wallet as something you’d build on top, not a native object — see our breakdown of how credit-based pricing actually works for what that build project typically involves.
Orb vs. Metronome: an independent breakdown
Orb and Metronome get cross-shopped constantly, and for good reason — both are developer-first usage metering and rating engines, both expose pricing as code rather than a dashboard, and neither ships a customer portal, invoicing UI or native payment recovery. This isn’t a Kribana-vs-either comparison — it’s a neutral look at how the two actually differ, since most guides either skip this pairing or flatten it into “they’re basically the same.”
Orb
Orb positions itself as a developer-first usage metering and pricing API — a clean, well-documented event-ingestion layer aimed at engineering teams who want to build their own billing surface on top of a strong metering primitive, rather than adopt someone else’s portal or invoicing UI. It reads as the more general-purpose of the two: an API-first metering engine that fits any usage-priced product, not one positioned around a specific vertical.
Metronome
Metronome describes itself as usage-based billing infrastructure specifically for AI and cloud platforms, and its support model leans enterprise-paced — built for platform teams already operating at real scale rather than a team standing up metering for the first time. Stripe acquired Metronome in January 2026; how that changes its roadmap, pricing and independence from the rest of the Stripe ecosystem is still playing out, and worth factoring in if you’re evaluating it today.
Where they genuinely differ
- Positioning. Orb reads as the more general-purpose metering API for any usage-priced product. Metronome leans specifically into AI and cloud-infrastructure platforms, which shows up in how it talks about itself and who it targets for support.
- Support model.Metronome’s support is built around enterprise-paced platform teams already operating at scale. That’s a real signal about who each one is designed to onboard easily — a small team standing up metering for the first time is a different buyer than an established AI-infrastructure platform tuning a rating engine that’s already handling significant volume.
- Ownership.Stripe’s January 2026 acquisition of Metronome is the biggest recent fact separating the two, independent of the products themselves. Orb remains independent; Metronome is now a Stripe-owned product, which is worth weighing if staying independent of any single payments vendor matters to your team.
- What’s the same.Neither ships a customer portal, invoicing UI, native credit wallet, or automated payment recovery — both are metering-and-rating engines that assume you’ll build (or buy separately) the rest of the billing stack. Pricing for both is a custom quote; neither publishes numbers.
Neither is a finished billing product in the way Kribana or Chargebee are — that’s a deliberate scope choice on their end, not a gap unique to one over the other. If what you actually need is metering-as-code that your engineering team owns end to end, the choice between Orb and Metronome comes down to whether your product and team profile matches Metronome’s AI/cloud-platform, enterprise-paced positioning, or you’d rather work with Orb’s more general-purpose, independent posture.
FAQ
What is usage-based billing software?
Usage-based billing software meters consumption — API calls, tokens, compute-seconds, seats — and turns that raw usage into a price, an invoice or a wallet deduction. The category ranges from developer-first metering APIs that engineering teams build on (Orb, Metronome) to fully hosted platforms that also ship a customer portal, invoicing and payment recovery (Kribana, Chargebee), to open-source cores you self-host (Lago) and enterprise order-to-cash suites (Zuora).
Which usage-based billing platform is best for AI companies specifically?
It depends on what you're optimizing for. If you want native credit wallets, a finished customer portal and automated recovery without a build project, Kribana is built specifically for that. If your team wants to own the metering and rating logic in code and build the rest yourselves, Orb or Metronome are the more established developer-first choices, with Metronome positioning itself specifically around AI and cloud-platform scale.
Do these platforms support credit-based or prepaid pricing?
Unevenly. Kribana ships native credit wallets — top-ups, low-balance alerts, grants and paid-credit tracking — as a finished product. Lago exposes credit and prepaid-balance primitives through its API that you assemble yourself. Orb, Metronome, Chargebee, Stripe Billing and Zuora don't have a dedicated credit-wallet object; teams on those platforms typically simulate prepaid balances with custom logic on top of the core ledger.
How much does usage-based billing software cost?
Published pricing is the exception, not the rule, in this category. Chargebee's Flow plan and Stripe Billing both publish a starting rate (a percentage of volume plus, for Chargebee, an included event allowance). Orb, Metronome and Zuora are custom quotes. Kribana is also a percentage-of-billed-revenue model set per account — contact sales for a rate rather than expecting a public price list, which is standard for this category.
What's the easiest usage-based billing platform to migrate to?
It depends more on the destination than the source. Platforms with a native importer for your current provider's usage events and invoice history (Kribana ships importers for Orb, Chargebee, Lago and Stripe) typically get you to a first invoice in one to two weeks, run in parallel before cutover. Moving to a metering-only platform like Orb or Metronome usually means an API export and manual re-mapping, since there's no vendor-provided switch path and no portal or invoicing to migrate in the first place.
Should I choose a metering API or a fully hosted billing platform?
That's really the central split in this category. A metering API (Orb, Metronome) gives you the most control and the least finished product — you're building the portal, invoicing, dunning and credit logic yourself on top of a strong ledger. A fully hosted platform (Kribana, Chargebee) trades some of that low-level control for a working billing surface — pricing, portal, invoicing, recovery — on day one. The right choice tracks your engineering bandwidth and how differentiated your billing logic actually needs to be, not which one is objectively "better."
See where Kribana fits in.
Metering, wallets, invoicing, portal and an agent that acts after the invoice — bring your current stack to the call.