Orb and Commet can both calculate usage-based charges. The difference is how much infrastructure your team still needs to operate around that calculation.
Orb gives teams a specialized revenue design layer for metrics, prices, and invoices. Commet replaces the seams between metering, product access, subscriptions, commercial operations, and payment providers with one monetization engine.
For AI companies, the result is practical: fewer systems to reconcile, no custom glue between usage and access, and one place to launch a plan, control what customers can consume, and recover the resulting payment.
TL;DR
| Orb | Commet | |
|---|---|---|
| Core role | Revenue design and usage billing platform | Monetization engine across product usage and payment rails |
| Metering | Query-based metrics, custom SQL, backfills, and simulations | Direct event, feature, plan, limit, and entitlement model |
| Product access | Licenses, credit balances, alerts, and access workflows | Real-time feature access and remaining-consumption checks |
| Payments | Native invoicing and collection through connected gateways | Multi-PSP routing, fallbacks, tokenization, retries, or Commet as provider |
| Merchant of Record | No; connect tax and payment providers | Optional Commet MoR alongside your own PSPs |
| How teams operate | Dashboard, API, roles, and test mode | Dashboard, SDKs, API, CLI, MCP, and your own agents |
| Best fit | Teams willing to operate metering as a specialized layer | AI companies that want one system from event to payment |
The architectural difference
Orb adds a specialized metric layer
Orb stores raw events and lets teams define query-based metrics over them. A company can create a metric over historical data, use custom SQL for aggregations, build multidimensional prices, and simulate price changes before publishing a new version.
That flexibility comes with another model to operate. Product events become Orb events, then Orb metrics, then prices and invoices. Access control, payment routing, tax providers, and the rest of the commercial operation still need to stay aligned with that layer.
Orb then uses those metrics to calculate charges, generate invoices, collect payments through connected gateways, and feed revenue workflows.
Commet starts with what the customer can use and how it gets charged
Commet connects the complete product-to-payment path:
- Track a customer action
- Organize it as a product feature
- Add the feature to a plan
- Check access, limits, or remaining consumption
- Calculate the subscription charge
- Route the payment to the right provider
The same feature can define what the customer bought, what the product should allow, how much they consumed, and what the subscription should charge.
This architecture removes interpretation layers between what happened in the product and what the customer should pay. Teams can still launch usage, credit, balance, seat, tiered, and hybrid models, but they do not need to maintain a separate SQL-based billing pipeline to keep access and charges synchronized.
Metering and price design
Flexible metrics are useful. They are not enough to run monetization.
Orb lets teams build query-based metrics, custom SQL aggregations, backfills, and historical price simulations. The cost of that flexibility is a specialized data model that product, billing, and finance teams must understand and keep connected to the rest of the stack.
Commet solves the operational problem directly:
- Track any billable customer action through the SDK or API
- Organize events as the features your product actually sells
- Attach those features to usage, credit, prepaid balance, seat, tiered, or hybrid plans
- Process events idempotently so retries never double-count consumption
- Check access, limits, and remaining units in real time
- Let non-technical teams change included usage and plan configuration without code
- Turn the same consumption state into the charge sent to the selected PSP
There is no separate query layer to reconcile before your product knows what a customer can use or your billing engine knows what to charge.
Orb exposes more machinery for teams that specifically want to write and maintain custom billing queries. Commet is the better monetization infrastructure for teams that want accurate usage, flexible pricing, product access, and collection to work together by default.
Learn more about tracking events with Commet.
Plans, credits, and product access
Both platforms can model more than a recurring flat fee. Orb supports configurable prices, credits, license allocations, and overage rates. Turning those billing objects into product behavior can still require alerts, webhooks, and application logic.
Commet makes that behavior native to the plan:
- Usage features measure billable actions
- Access features grant or revoke capabilities
- Seat and quota features define limits
- Credit plans decrement units
- Prepaid balance plans decrement money
- Free, recurring, one-time, tiered, and hybrid prices can coexist
- The SDK or API checks access and remaining consumption in real time
Business teams can change a plan, its limits, or its included features from the dashboard. Agents can operate the same model through MCP. Engineering does not need to redeploy the product every time the commercial package changes.
Commet does not ask teams to translate billing state into a second access system. The feature, entitlement check, consumption state, subscription, and resulting payment are part of the same operational model.
Explore Commet features and entitlements.
Invoicing, payments, and recovery
Orb supports native invoicing, automatic payment collection, receipts, payment-method synchronization, and dunning through connected gateways. The gateway collects the invoice, but it remains a connected destination rather than an orchestrated set of payment rails.
Commet treats the payment provider as a routable part of the subscription:
- Connect multiple PSP accounts
- Choose a provider by country or payment context
- Retry with a fallback provider when the primary one fails
- Store and refresh payment credentials for reuse across supported providers
- Normalize provider errors for checkout and recovery
- Coordinate retries, dunning communication, and self-serve recovery
- Keep payment attempts and subscription state synchronized
Orb connects gateways so it can collect the invoices it calculates. Commet is designed to decide which connected provider should attempt each charge and what should happen when that provider fails.
That difference matters for companies entering markets where local rails improve authorization, negotiating processor rates, or protecting revenue from a single-provider outage.
Explore Commet payment orchestration.
Merchant of Record and tax
Orb requires teams to connect a separate tax product such as Avalara, Anrok, Numeral, Sphere, Stripe Tax, or TaxJar. The company using Orb remains the seller and owns the corresponding registrations, compliance, disputes, and settlement structure.
Commet can work in that same bring-your-own-provider model, or it can become the Merchant of Record.
As MoR, Commet handles local-currency collection, tax, compliance, disputes, and global payouts. A startup can use Commet as its first payment provider, then connect its own PSPs and localize payment rails as it grows. Plans, usage events, entitlements, and subscriptions remain in the same engine during that evolution.
The MoR route is optional. Companies that already have their own entities and processor contracts can use Commet only for billing and orchestration.
Read more about using Commet as Merchant of Record.
How product, finance, and engineering teams work
Orb provides a dashboard, roles, test mode, pricing workflows, and an API. Those tools help teams operate Orb’s billing model, but changes still need to remain aligned with the product’s access logic, payment gateways, and tax stack.
Commet is designed around a shared monetization sandbox:
- Engineering integrates through SDKs or the full API
- Developers inspect and operate the system through the CLI
- Business teams change plans, limits, offers, discounts, and trials from the dashboard
- Teams and their agents operate Commet through MCP
Every interface works on the same objects. A plan edited by a business user is the plan the SDK checks, the billing engine consumes, and the payment orchestrator charges.
Feature comparison
| Dimension | Orb | Commet |
|---|---|---|
| Event ingestion | Raw immutable events with scalable ingestion | SDK and API events connected to product features |
| Metric flexibility | Query metrics, custom SQL, dimensions, backfills | Feature-based count and consumption models |
| Pricing iteration | Price versioning and historical simulations | Plans editable through dashboard, API, CLI, or MCP |
| Credits and prepaid | Recurring, prepaid, promotional, and custom-currency credits | Credit plans and prepaid balance plans |
| Entitlements | License allocations, balance alerts, and access workflows | Native access, seat, quota, and usage features with real-time checks |
| Invoicing and dunning | Native invoicing, collection, retries, and finance workflows | Invoicing, provider error mapping, retries, communication, and recovery |
| Payment providers | Connected gateways for invoice collection | Provider routing, country rules, fallbacks, tokenization, and retries |
| Merchant of Record | Not offered | Optional Commet MoR alongside owned PSPs |
| Broader revenue workflows | Major strength: reporting, revenue recognition, and finance operations | Deliberately focused on measuring usage and charging through the right rail |
Pricing
Orb does not publish fixed dollar prices. Its public plans are Core, Advanced, and Enterprise, all sold through Contact Sales. Orb states that pricing is based on billings and event volume, with a platform fee on Advanced and Enterprise.
Commet publishes separate paths for different stages:
- Launch uses Commet as Merchant of Record with no monthly fee and charges 5% + $0.40 per successful transaction
- Growth includes $40,000 per month in tracked revenue for $375, then charges 1%
- Scale includes $85,000 per month in tracked revenue for $750, then charges 0.7%
- Enterprise uses a declining revenue rate or flat fee
The right cost comparison depends on the complete stack.
With Orb, include the Orb contract, payment gateway fees, tax software, and the engineering required to connect and reconcile those systems. Commet consolidates that operation: use your own PSPs through one engine or use Commet as MoR without adding a separate billing architecture.
See the current numbers on the Commet pricing page.
The narrower case for Orb
Orb can fit when:
- Custom SQL and multidimensional metering are central requirements
- You need to recompute metrics over historical raw events
- Pricing teams need simulations before publishing contract changes
- Event throughput and enterprise finance workflows dominate the decision
- Payment processing, tax, and access systems are already established
- Your organization explicitly wants a specialized metric and revenue layer around its existing stack
That is a narrower requirement than running monetization end to end. It assumes the surrounding payment, access, tax, and commercial systems already work and your team is willing to keep them synchronized.
When Commet is the better choice
Choose Commet when:
- Usage, plans, product access, subscriptions, and payments should share one source of truth
- Your application needs real-time access and remaining-consumption checks
- You want to route payments across multiple PSPs without custom application logic
- Business teams and agents need to iterate on monetization without engineering tickets
- You want to launch globally with a Merchant of Record
- You expect to add owned PSPs later without replacing your billing engine
Commet removes the need to operate monetization as a collection of specialized systems. The advantage is not one more feature in a table; it is the continuity from what a customer consumes to how access is controlled and which provider collects the charge.
Moving from Orb to Commet
An Orb migration should begin with the metric model, not the invoices.
- Inventory raw events and billable metrics. Identify which metrics map directly to Commet features and which rely on custom SQL or multidimensional transformations.
- Design the feature model. Connect each billable action, quota, seat, or access rule to the plans that sell it.
- Pre-aggregate where necessary. Complex Orb queries may need to become a stable value calculated before the event reaches Commet.
- Recreate plans, credits, and subscriptions. Preserve billing periods, allowances, overages, negotiated prices, and current balances.
- Send events to both systems. Compare consumption and invoices for at least one complete billing period.
- Keep the existing PSP connected. Moving the billing engine does not require changing the payment provider on day one.
- Add routing or MoR by cohort. Introduce fallback providers, local rails, or Commet MoR only where they create value.
Payment-method portability depends on the gateway, vault, region, and customer authorization. Historical custom metrics also need explicit validation; Commet does not claim that every Orb SQL expression has an automatic equivalent.
Explore the payment orchestration docs, review Commet pricing, or book a demo to map your Orb configuration.