Why 2026 will redefine how software companies design revenue

If pricing is rebuilt by engineering and reconciled by finance, it is not a strategy. It is a bottleneck.

This single sentence captures the structural shift now reshaping how modern software and AI companies grow.

Over the past year, one theme has surfaced in nearly every customer conversation, evaluation, and customer dinners: pricing has become the most important and most constrained lever of growth.

AI has fundamentally changed the economics of products. Costs are dynamic. Value is variable. Usage is unpredictable. Traditional pricing models that rely on seats, static tiers, or bundles no longer match the way these products create value. Companies know this, yet very few know how to respond.

The challenge is not a lack of intent. It is a lack of coordination.

• Engineering carries pricing because they are forced to rebuild it
• Finance carries pricing because they must reconcile the impact
• Product carries pricing because experimentation is impossible without it
• GTM carries pricing into every relationship, contract, upsell and deal, optimizing in real time

But no one owns pricing end to end. And as long as this remains true, pricing becomes the limiting factor in a company’s ability to scale.

From billing automation to pricing strategy: what changed?

A year ago, teams came to Orb because their billing workflows could not keep up with their growth.

Today, they open with pricing.

Why?

Because AI has made pricing impossible to ignore. Marginal costs fluctuate by the second. Customer value is highly contextual. Consumption patterns are nonlinear. Teams can no longer justify decisions with outdated assumptions or fixed models. They need visibility. They need iteration. They need clarity across functions. And they need a system that treats pricing as a first-class part of the business.

Our own data reinforces this shift: engagement with pricing content is now outperforming billing content by wide margins. Teams are not just interested in pricing; they are actively trying to solve it.

The era of revenue design

Traditional pricing approaches break because they are built for a world where value and usage were predictable. That world is gone.

Revenue design is emerging as the new standard.

It is not a spreadsheet.

It is not a quarterly meeting.

It is not an afterthought to the product roadmap.

Revenue design is a continuous system that connects product, engineering, and finance through one unified loop:

Design → Execute → Analyze → Iterate

It shifts pricing from decisions made in isolation to decisions made with context, data, and accountability.

To support this shift, companies need an infrastructure foundation that can:

• ingest raw product and usage data
• unify revenue signals across systems
• model and execute pricing logic without rebuilds
• simulate pricing changes before launch
• support GTM, finance, and product workflows in one place

This foundation did not exist in legacy billing systems. It is why teams struggle.

What Orb built in 2025

In 2025, we focused on the foundations required to support revenue design at scale:

• Simulations: Model the impact of a price change before you ship it—so pricing decisions can be rapid and data-driven.
• Flexible pricing models: From credits to commits, Orb now supports the building blocks companies need to get creative about how value maps to cost.
• Customer-facing transparency: A new API endpoint for building dashboards, pricing calculators, and checkout flows directly from Orb data. Billing is part of the customer experience and when it's clear, it builds trust.
• Faster migrations and tailored invoicing: The operational levers to make billing agile and actually customer-centric.

These were not isolated launches. They were steps toward a unified strategy: build the system companies need to treat pricing as a core operating function.

Orb in 2026: turning pricing into an operating system

In 2026, the direction becomes even clearer.

1. Pricing becomes a cross-functional system

We will bring clarity to who owns what when pricing changes and support collaboration across engineering, finance, product, and GTM.

2. Usage-based and hybrid models become high-trust and low-friction

Enterprises adopting UBB for the first time need confidence, not chaos.

3. Pricing becomes something you strategize, not calculate

Revenue design will make experimentation fast, iteration safe, and insights immediate.

4. Orb becomes the operating system for pricing

One foundation for raw events, pricing logic, billing execution, revenue workflows, and strategic decision making.

‍—

Pricing has become a board-level concern. I believe revenue design will be the defining competitive advantage of 2026.

And at Orb, we intend to help companies build it.