75% time saved: Stytch shifts focus from billing to product with Orb

Stytch is an all-in-one platform for authentication, providing a suite of passwordless solutions and password-based authentication.

Pain Points

Billing and invoicing used to take the Stytch team one full business day each month, and their system lacked the flexibility they needed. Making any pricing changes would involve engineering resources and time for their finance team.

Solution

Stytch got set up with Orb in a matter of weeks with minimal effort and hasn’t required re-work since. Orb is now Stytch’s main billing system—it calculates customer charges, generates invoices, and sends them out. Stytch has made pricing changes and continues to provide bespoke pricing plans without requiring additional resources.

Key Points

• Stych transitioned to Orb because previous its billing system was inflexible
• Since then, billing has been a “set it and forget it” exercise for engineering
• They’ve made several pricing changes and saved 8 hours per month previously spent on billing

75% reduction in time spent processing bills and invoicing

On April 17, 2023, Stytch announced new pricing on its blog. The goal was to provide customers with more self-serve options and increase transparency, flexibility, and scalability.

In search of a new billing system

Before launching its new pricing, Stytch realized that its billing solution wouldn’t support its new pricing model. On the BizOps side, Termeh Ahi’s team would manually generate invoices based on bespoke plans, taking one full business day each month.

Logan Gore, a software engineer, was tasked with finding a solution to support the upcoming billing change, avoid manual work, and save time for invoicing. He started with a conversation about building versus buying but quickly discovered the team would need to dedicate a couple of engineers in perpetuity to maintain it—something they didn’t have the resources to do.

Logan evaluated providers and chose Orb because of its low required engineering effort, ability to support many pricing tiers, and the transparent, detailed customer experience it provides.

Rolling out Orb and saving 75% of time spent on billing

Rolling out Orb took two weeks, including Logan building out a net new API for Stytch’s self-serve tiers. Then Termeh stepped in to translate contracts into plans in Orb.

Stytch rolled out its billing updates in April 2023 without any manual billing, and Orb is now its main billing system. Since then, the team spends 75% less time per month on billing.

Automating bespoke plans while providing pricing flexibility and analytics

With Orb, go-to-market teams have the flexibility to create bespoke agreements and pricing changes as needed, as well as data to power revenue reporting and analytics.

Staying focused on what matters most: The customer

When Stytch launched its new pricing, they were very clear about how they would support customers—because trust is a core tenet of their business. Carrying that level of care for customers into billing has been easy because Orb ensures billing is accurate.

Today, customers have a better billing experience and receive a dashboard with their bills where they can see key metrics and trends.

Delivering better products without worrying about billing

With Orb, Stytch engineers can focus on delivering more features to customers instead of worrying about billing. Logan spends under one hour a month on Orb and has made next to no changes since he set it up.

Because the team hasn’t been focused on billing, they’ve released a number of new products since rolling out Orb. They can deliver better outcomes for customers by way of innovative products and better pricing outcomes for everyone—because iterating is made easy.