Orb as Marketplace Metering Layer

This points to distribution becoming part of the product. If Orb becomes the system that turns raw usage into invoice ready charges inside AWS, Azure, or GCP buying flows, it can ride cloud sellers and marketplace procurement instead of winning every deal from scratch. That matters most for AI and data vendors, where billing depends on high volume event streams like tokens, GPU seconds, requests, or storage, and where buyers increasingly want those charges to land inside existing cloud spend commitments.

• Orb already sits in the right technical layer for this role. It ingests millions of usage events per second, lets teams define billable metrics in SQL style logic, and then pushes invoices and accounting outputs downstream. That makes it a natural metering engine for vendors that need cloud marketplace distribution but do not want to build billing infrastructure themselves.
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• There is precedent for this model. m3ter markets itself on AWS Marketplace as usage metering and rating infrastructure that plugs into CRM, CPQ, ERP, and AWS Marketplace workflows. Metronome also added AWS and Azure marketplace integrations in 2025, showing that billing vendors can become part of cloud channel distribution, not just back office software.
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• The economic setup is also getting better. Google Cloud moved eligible marketplace deals to a variable revenue share model in 2025, as low as 1.5% for some transactions, and AWS Marketplace already supports SaaS metering records submitted by vendors. That lowers channel friction and creates room for shared economics between the cloud, the software vendor, and a metering specialist like Orb.
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The next step is for metering to become embedded channel infrastructure for AI software and data products. If Orb deepens marketplace and co sell ties with the major clouds, it can shift from selling one company at a time to powering many vendors behind the scenes, which would raise distribution leverage, increase event volume, and make Orb harder to replace in modern quote to cash stacks.