Lago vs Orb: Usage-Based Billing for AI and SaaS

Both Lago and Orb can meter AI usage, manage prepaid credits, and bill customers with negotiated terms. The comparison becomes more useful when your team introduces a new model or price and has to explain the resulting charge.

Both platforms offer prepaid credits. Lago's ingestion pipeline typically updates the ongoing wallet balance in under a second after a usage event lands; Orb describes real-time balance updates but does not publish a comparable sub-second figure. That balance includes unbilled usage, tax, and draft invoices, so customers can see what remains before the invoice. Orb offers a packaged workflow for testing prices against historical usage. Lago Cloud is a managed service with an open-source billing engine that keeps raw event detail linked to billing context at high volume and works with multiple payment processors.

Bring the same proposed offer to both demos: a self-serve plan, a negotiated rate, AI usage, and prepaid credits. Trace an event into the balance and invoice, then ask what your team can change when the model, price, or payment provider changes.

Lago vs Orb at a glance

Keep the AI usage detail your next price will need

An AI request may carry input, output, and cached tokens, model, region, and tool-call data. Those fields explain today's charge. They may also become tomorrow's price. If you keep only a blended token count, a later price change cannot distinguish a costly reasoning call from a cheaper one.

Lago’s Agent SDK captures supported calls from OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini, and Mistral. Its AI integration catalog also covers Cloudflare AI Gateway, Databricks AI Gateway, Snowflake Cortex, and Ramp Router. The SDK extracts and normalizes supported usage, then sends billing events in the background. Coverage varies by integration and API call, so verify the fields your pricing uses.

Orb’s published integrations include payments, finance, and marketplaces, but list no AI provider or gateway capture connectors. Orb can ingest usage events through its API, Segment, or S3/GCS. Your implementation must supply the model and token fields before Orb can bill on them. If you use several models or gateways, ask both teams to trace a real call into a billable event.

For large event streams, Lago's Kafka/Redpanda and ClickHouse pipeline stores raw events alongside enriched records that connect each event to its plan and charge. Lago reports 1–3 million sustained events per second and under two seconds p99 from event to billable usage in its documented configuration.

Orb's standard ingestion path retains raw events. At the scale of several million events per second cited by Orb, its hosted rollups aggregate events before Orb stores them. That preserves throughput but leaves only the configured dimensions and totals in Orb. Imagine a rollup that keeps model and total tokens but omits region and cached tokens. You cannot recover those omitted fields from that aggregate when you later decide to price them; you need the original events from another source. Test what each platform retains in the configuration you would actually buy.

What about Orb's pricing simulations?

Orb Simulations runs on events, billable metrics, plans, and subscriptions already represented in Orb. You choose a historical period and proposed prices; Orb returns revenue and customer-impact projections plus churn guidance. Its published workflow does not document how to add external inputs such as future adoption or provider costs. A confident-looking answer can miss the assumptions that determine your actual revenue and margin.

Lago gives you the keys: granular event data available through its API for the financial model, data system, or LLM workflow you choose. Combine it with your assumptions about adoption, costs, customer mix, and contracts to assess revenue and margin. You can inspect every assumption and change the model as your business changes.

Make credits and invoices follow the offer

A wallet is a prepaid credit balance. Its scope is the set of charges that balance can pay. Imagine a customer who prepays $1,000 for AI usage and owes a $300 platform fee at the start of the month. You may promise that the $1,000 pays only for a named model, or that it can also pay the platform fee. Those are different offers; the billing system should support both.

Lago lets you restrict one wallet to a named AI usage metric and keep the platform fee payable separately, or let a broader wallet pay eligible subscription charges, including that upfront fee. If a customer has several wallets, set the order in which they are used. Lago's event-driven pipeline typically updates the real-time ongoing balance in under a second after a usage event lands. The balance reflects unbilled usage, tax, and draft invoices, so customers can see what remains before an invoice is issued. Automatic top-ups help keep usage moving; purchased credits become spendable after payment succeeds. Credits are deducted on eligible subscription and progressive-billing invoices. If the balance reaches zero, Lago alerts your application, which enforces any hard usage cutoff.

Orb also has real-time balances, credit blocks restricted to selected items, allocations, and top-ups. Orb publishes no comparable sub-second balance update figure; its documented real-time alert path takes seconds to minutes for eligible metrics. Its current documentation says credits can pay usage and fixed fees billed at period end, but not fixed fees billed upfront. In the example, if the $1,000 is a general commitment, Orb still collects the upfront $300 platform fee separately. Lago can let the same balance pay that eligible subscription fee and AI usage. Ask both teams to show the first invoice and the usage invoice so the difference is visible.

Progressive billing: set the invoice milestones in advance

Progressive billing invoices usage as spend grows, so a large balance does not sit unbilled until the end of the period. Lago's progressive billing lets you set unlimited named thresholds against lifetime usage, followed by a recurring increment. For example, set triggers at $100, $1,000, and $10,000, then another trigger for each additional $10,000. A negotiated subscription can have its own thresholds without creating a new plan.

That sequence lets you bill a new customer in smaller steps, then send fewer invoices as usage grows. Orb's threshold invoicing also bills before period end, but its published setup repeats one subscription-wide amount. A staged policy needs API updates. Neither system promises an invoice for the exact threshold amount during a fast usage spike; have both teams show when the invoice issues and what it contains.

Keep a managed service without giving up control

Lago Cloud runs the billing infrastructure for you. Its US and EU hosting options let you choose the core datacenter, and Lago is GDPR compliant, with a documented DPA and EU Standard Contractual Clauses. Privacy teams can review the chosen region and the data flow through optional integrations. If you later need more deployment control, Lago also supports self-hosting in your own cloud or on-premises. Orb's published subprocessor list places its cloud infrastructure and data warehouse processing in the US; Orb does not document an EU region or self-hosted deployment.

Engineers can inspect Lago's open-source billing engine even when they use managed Cloud, extend workflows through APIs and webhooks, and contribute upstream for review. That gives your team a way to understand how usage becomes an invoice and to build around it. Orb's core application code is private, so its APIs are the extension point.

Lago is designed to work across payment processors. It lists Adyen, GoCardless, Stripe, and MoneyHash; a team can connect another provider through webhooks and APIs. That lets you add a local processor or change acquirers without making one payment ecosystem the basis of your pricing model. Adyen owns Orb. Orb says customers may keep their preferred processor, but its payment documentation lists Adyen and Stripe. Lago gives you processor choice without making your billing platform part of a payment company.

Sales and finance also need timely billing data. With Lago's Salesforce package configured, subscription, invoice, and credit-note updates reach Salesforce through webhooks in real time. Orb's billing-to-CRM objects sync only daily. A subscription change, invoice, or credit movement may not appear in Salesforce until the next sync, leaving sales and success with stale billing context during a customer conversation. Both have substantial NetSuite integrations (Lago, Orb); test your item mappings, tax, credits, and payment direction instead of awarding either vendor a generic ERP point.

Make both vendors prove the next offer

Use one representative AI customer and the same data in both demos:

1. Send a burst of model calls with input, output, and cached tokens. Trace one event through the charge and show which raw fields remain available.
2. Configure a self-serve rate and a negotiated customer with two offers: credits restricted to AI usage, then credits that can also pay the upfront platform fee. Show the ongoing balance, a failed paid top-up, and both resulting invoices.
3. Cross two spend milestones, then reconcile the invoice, credit application, and Salesforce record. Reprice one model using both historical usage and a stated adoption assumption.

Request the expected event capacity, retention, integration access, and total cost for your deployment in writing. Book a Lago Cloud demo with your current plan, sample usage, and one proposed price change so the team can show this end to end.