Orb delivers scalable, accurate usage-based billing with LaunchDarkly

In the business of usage-based billing, there's no room for error. Orb provides a critical billing solution for companies across various industries, including AI, cloud infrastructure, and FinTech. The Orb platform ingests usage data, manages pricing, and generates the invoices that support its customers' revenue operations. In a high-stakes industry where “billing must be correct,” Orb faces the challenge of balancing innovation with mission-critical reliability.

For Orb, accuracy is both a top priority and a central operating principle that shapes every technology decision. "When people think of billing, they think of it as something that has to be right," explains Kshitij Grover, Co-founder and CTO. "If you show your users the wrong dollar amount or charge them the wrong dollar amount, obviously that's a big deal."

This imperative for accuracy established a high standard for Orb's development team. Modern billing requirements are complex; Grover notes that "everyone has a different way of handling things like discounting, promotions, proration, and invoice display." Yet the development team needed to build and improve features quickly while still meeting the highest standard for accuracy in their platform.

The stakes are especially high because of Orb's role in generating their customers' revenue. "We're inheriting that trust surface area between our customers and their customers," says Grover. “So we need a solution that can help us ship quickly and safely.” Any error in billing has the potential to ripple through multiple businesses, making traditional deployment processes uncomfortably risky.

The existing DIY solution was limited in scalability, lacked visibility for non-engineers, and made auditing changes cumbersome.  The process also created a precarious coupling between code deployment and feature release. "If in order to release a feature, you have to push out a deployment, and you have two problems," Grover explains. "One problem is, in case something breaks, you now need to redeploy the service. The second is that it's hard to deploy partially."

Orb implemented LaunchDarkly as more than just a feature management platform—they made it the foundation of their trust-based development process. The solution spans their entire product delivery team, including several teams of developers, two product managers, and two designers, all working together to develop new and better features while maintaining reliability.

This trust framework operates using several key methods:

• Infrastructure Protection: Orb uses LaunchDarkly to manage its most important operations—monthly billing cycles.
• Progressive Risk Management: New features, especially those affecting billing calculations, can be rolled out gradually with close monitoring. "If we are launching a feature that is really only applicable to some subset of customers that we know have been asking for it, we can expose it to them," says Grover. This approach allows Orb to innovate while containing any potential risks.
• Verification Through Experimentation: For critical API changes, Orb uses LaunchDarkly to run careful comparisons. "We were able to have split traffic and confirm that the responses we were returning were the same," Grover notes. "That sort of correctness comparison was driven by LaunchDarkly."
• Safe and Rapid Pricing Evolution: The platform enables controlled rollout of new pricing models. "We have a LaunchDarkly flag which controls parallelism," Grover explains. "For this given account, for this given migration, how quickly are we going to progress through all the invoices and subscriptions and customers and move things around from one version to another."

With LaunchDarkly as its trust framework, Orb has achieved what once seemed contradictory: accelerated innovation with enhanced reliability.

• Speed with Safety: Feature delivery time has been reduced from days to hours, and any issues can be resolved instantly. "If we need to roll something back, it can happen in seconds instead of 15-20 minutes," Grover explains. "With billing, even 15 minutes is significant—you could issue hundreds or thousands of invoices in that time."
• Confident Innovation: The ability to carefully control feature rollouts has enabled Orb to tackle complex implementations. Their real-time revenue reporting feature demonstrates this approach. "We have this sophisticated reporting feature set where your finance team needs to be able to look at revenue in real time," says Grover. When they discovered the new interface was confusing for users, they could quickly adjust the rollout without compromising existing workflows.
• Scalable Reliability: Orb uses LaunchDarkly to optimize infrastructure scaling during high-demand periods, especially during the beginning of the month when invoice volumes peak. By leveraging feature flags, Orb dynamically adjusts service configurations to scale up for heavy loads and scale down afterward, keeping costs down and preventing disruptions in speed or availability. This approach eliminates the need for manual scripts or redeployments, saving time and reducing operational risk.
  
  "We have a LaunchDarkly configuration for what should be the state of the service depending on where we are in the month," Grover explains. "During the first of the month, we want to scale really aggressively because we have a huge backlog of invoices to get through. We flip a flag in LaunchDarkly, and that orchestrates which services are scaling in what way."
• Complete Auditability: Every change is now tracked and reversible. "Let's say we realize, 'Oh, this month, we have N million more invoices to issue, and so we need to scale up even more than we usually do.' That difference will be captured in some state, and that state is now still in LaunchDarkly," says Grover. This audit trail provides an additional layer of confidence in Orb's operations.

The impact has been so significant that deployments are no longer anxiety-inducing events. "Production deployments are a non-event. There's not this celebration anymore, because deployments have become a way of life," Grover reflects. "From your teams all the way to your execs, it's just a given that you're continually deploying."

As Orb continues to expand its platform to serve more complex billing needs, LaunchDarkly remains central to its development strategy. "LaunchDarkly is so embedded in our on-call systems," Grover reflects. "It becomes a natural place for any infrastructure change."

Grover considers LaunchDarkly a crucial investment in maintaining customer confidence while supporting innovative feature development. This will become increasingly important as Orb helps more companies manage their usage-based pricing. Grover reflects, “How do you innovate while maintaining this critical role you have in the ecosystem and the stack? I think LaunchDarkly, genuinely, is very central to that.”