Uncovering hidden revenue with pricing simulations
How billing tool Orb is helping SaaS and AI companies crack the code on product pricing.
If you're running an AI or SaaS business in 2025, you've probably had at least one existential pricing crisis.
You know the one—that moment when you're staring at your pricing page wondering if you're leaving money on the table or scaring away potential customers.
The truth is, pricing AI and SaaS products is tough. So tough that no one knows how to price these tools, apparently.
It's like a multidimensional puzzle where the pieces keep changing shape. On one side, you've got eye-watering infrastructure costs for those compute-hungry AI models. On the other, you've got customers with wildly different perceptions of what your product is actually worth to them.
Traditional "set it and forget it" pricing approaches simply don't cut it anymore.
Not when your costs fluctuate based on usage patterns. Not when your competitors are constantly refining their own pricing models. And certainly not when the wrong pricing strategy can sink an otherwise stellar product.
Today we’re shining a light on Orb, a solution that's flipping the script on how AI and SaaS businesses approach pricing.
Rather than relying on gut feelings or competitor benchmarking, Orb enables data-driven pricing simulations that allow companies to test different strategies before deploying them live. Think of it as your pricing sandbox—a place to experiment, refine, and optimize without the real-world consequences of getting it wrong.
The pricing problem: Where AI businesses go wrong
Common pricing challenges for AI & SaaS products
Let's get specific about why pricing keeps founders and product leaders up at night:
Dynamic value perception: Your chatbot might save an enterprise customer thousands of hours in customer service time, while a small business might only use it occasionally. How do you price for both without alienating either?
High infrastructure costs: Every API call, every token processed, every model run has a real cost attached—and those costs can spike unexpectedly when your product takes off.
Subscription fatigue & usage-based risks: Monthly-subscription-averse customers push AI companies toward usage-based models. But that introduces a new challenge— revenue unpredictability—making planning a guessing game.
Competitive differentiation: With thousands of AI startups vying for attention, your pricing strategy is often as important as your product features. Price too high and customers flee to competitors; price too low and you're leaving revenue on the table (or worse, signaling low quality).
(Side note: this article from Wing VC on the evolution of SaaS pricing in the AI era is great, for anyone interested in further reading on the topic.)
Common pricing mistakes companies make
Even the smartest teams routinely stumble when it comes to pricing:
The gut-feeling gamble: "Our competitor charges X, so we'll charge X-1."
Underestimating cost variables: Infrastructure and support costs, compute costs, API calls… all scale with usage. Companies that don't factor these variables into their pricing models often find themselves in a profitability crunch as they grow.
The one-size-fits-all trap: Rigid pricing tiers can result in revenue leakage and customer churn.
The "Set and Forget" mentality: Many teams treat pricing as a one-time decision rather than an ongoing optimization process.
If you're nodding along to any of these challenges, you're not alone—even frontier companies like OpenAI have to navigate difficult pricing decisions.
The traditional pricing playbook just doesn't work for modern software businesses—not when the technology, costs, and customer expectations are evolving this quickly.
So how is Orb trying to solve issues with SaaS and AI company pricing? Let’s take a look.
How Orb Simulations transforms pricing strategy
Orb is a usage-based billing and pricing SaaS. Their latest product, Simulations, lets businesses test different pricing strategies before implementing them.
Orb Simulations centers around data-driven simulations that model the revenue impact of various pricing scenarios. At its core, Orb leverages a proprietary raw event architecture called RevGraph—an amalgamation of revenue and graph technology—which ingests all usage data, pricing data, and product data to create a comprehensive view of customer interactions.
This powerful yet straightforward approach allows companies to forecast exactly how pricing or metric changes will affect revenue and customer behavior before rolling them out, by leveraging real time and actual historical usage data. When ready to launch, billing, invoicing, and reporting update simultaneously since the products all feed from the same RevGraph.
For businesses struggling with pricing uncertainty, Orb Simulations delivers tangible benefits:
Test different pricing models (flat-rate, usage-based, tiered) without affecting real customers.
Account for infrastructure expenses and operational costs when setting prices.
Identify different user profiles and optimize pricing for various usage patterns.
Predict how pricing changes will impact bottom-line results before implementation.
But lots of tools help with pricing—how’s Orb different?
Unlike other pricing solutions, Orb isn’t just about billing or reactive adjustments—it’s a strategic platform that enables AI and SaaS businesses to price smarter from the start. Here’s what makes it unique:
Simulation-first approach: Most pricing tools focus on real-time adjustments or competitor benchmarking. Orb is different—it allows companies to experiment safely before making live changes, preventing revenue leakage and customer churn.
Complementary approach: Orb works alongside existing pricing technologies, providing a controlled environment to validate pricing hypotheses before implementation.
Full-stack solution: Many companies use different tools for simulations, billing, and reporting—forcing teams to piece together insights manually. With RevGraph as its foundation, Orb integrates simulations with billing, invoicing, and reporting in one unified system.
AI-specific cost awareness: Orb accounts for compute costs, API usage, and other AI-specific variables, making it particularly useful for AI startups with high operational expenses.
Real-world customer impact: For a typical customer, Orb delivers $300K-$500K+ in value within the first year by optimizing pricing, accelerating revenue capture, and freeing up engineering resources.
"We're adjusting our pricing to boost revenue from lower-usage customers while rewarding high-usage ones with tiered discounts. Orb Simulations gave us clear revenue projections and cost impacts, helping us make an informed decision." — Hookdeck CEO Alexandre Bouchard
Beyond subscriptions: The future of software pricing
The pricing landscape for SaaS and AI companies is changing. Some clear trends are already emerging:
Hybrid pricing models are on the up:
Pure subscription models are fading as companies adopt more flexible approaches combining fixed fees with usage-based elements.
Personalization at scale:
AI-powered customization is enabling more tailored pricing based on individual customer value and behavior patterns.
Metric evolution:
Token-based and compute-based pricing metrics are becoming standard for AI products, while SaaS companies explore more value-aligned measurements.
Transparency:
More and more, customers want clear, predictable pricing without hidden fees or opaque enterprise negotiations.
For AI and SaaS companies navigating the complexities of modern pricing, Orb offers a path forward that's both practical and powerful. By replacing intuition-based approaches with data-driven simulations, businesses can reduce risk, maximize revenue, and build pricing models that scale alongside their growth.
Written by Shanice.