Case Study
How Orb Upgraded Data Exports
The Challenge
“Orb is a usage-based billing platform,” said Kshitij Grover, Co-Founder and CTO of Orb, whose customers include Perplexity, Vercel, and Replit. “It’s designed for businesses that bill customers for compute, storage, API requests, and other dynamic pricing metrics.”
Orb collects all this pricing data and makes it fully accessible to users, allowing for revenue reporting, forecasting, and usage insights.
“A lot of billing data needs to be exported and joined with other tables before finance teams can do meaningful analysis,” Grover continued. “We power some of those workflows with Orb. Others need to be completed in a data warehouse like BigQuery, S3, or Redshift.”
Before working with Prequel, Orb’s customers used CSV downloads and third-party ETL tools to access their data.
“Our customers would call us when they needed help using their ETL tools, but we didn’t own or manage these products,” said Eric Murphy, Engineering Manager at Orb. “We would do our best, but we didn’t have the tools we needed. We were digging into Google Cloud logs to help.”
“Customers would also complain, ‘This thing [ETL tool] is too slow,’” Murphy continued. “At that point, we knew it was time to build our own product to give our customers a better experience.”
Orb’s goals were:
- Decreasing the operational load of data exports on his team and Orb’s customers
- Delivering an enterprise-class data export product
“We evaluated two paths,” Murphy said. “One was building. The other was using Prequel.”
“We kept asking ourselves: Are we best qualified to handle the 10 or 11 export destinations we’d need to support?” Grover said. “The answer was no. We didn’t use those products in-house, so we didn’t want to go down the build path. There were also a series of risks, including those related to authentication, that we didn’t want to own.”
“The Prequel team gave us a lot of confidence that they’d thought clearly and deeply about the problem,” Grover continued. “As we worked with them, it was clear they’d thought about developer ergonomics, correctness, risk, and more. That gave us the confidence to choose Prequel.”
The Solution
Orb connected its Postgres database to Prequel’s platform and used Prequel’s React SDK to embed a sign-up form in its customer dashboard.
To sign up for Data Exports, Orb’s customers choose their destination from a drop-down menu and fill in the required information. After testing and confirming the connection, data begins flowing through to the customer’s destination immediately.
Customers can also choose the data models they want access to.
“Customers love the simplicity of Data Exports, especially those who previously used third-party ETL tools,” said Murphy. “Honestly, we don’t have to think about Prequel very often. It just runs in the background. Customers can access their data without any help from us.”
“Overall, Data Exports have been a success,” Murphy concluded. “Customers get a much better experience, and the operational load on our team has decreased tremendously.”
The Impact
