---
title: Tanso vs. Orb, Stigg, Schematic, and Metronome
description: Honest comparison of Tanso with Orb, Stigg, Schematic, Metronome, Limitr, and Paid.ai across credit wallets, repricing without a deploy, margin per customer, and agent-facing surfaces.
date: 2026-09-02
---

> Full site context for agents: https://tansohq.com/llms.txt

# Tanso vs. Orb, Stigg, Schematic, and Metronome

Four strong hosted billing platforms, one AI usage runtime (Limitr, by
Formata), and an open-source engine with a different job. They give you a
console to run your billing. Tanso runs the billing and also gives your
customers' agents a way in: readable pricing, signup, payments, spend caps.

| Capability | Tanso | Orb | Stigg | Schematic | Metronome | Limitr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open source / self-host | open source, self-hosted: one application plus Postgres | Proprietary, hosted only | Proprietary; hosted or BYOC in your own VPC | Proprietary, hosted, built on Stripe | Proprietary, hosted only | Apache-2.0 engine on GitHub; runs in your process (WASM), plus a cloud |
| What the vendor charges you | Nothing. No vendor bill, no per-event fees | Custom pricing on every tier; billed on invoice value plus ingested events | Free tier, then $399/mo plus per-entity and per-event fees | Free under $5K/mo billing volume; Growth $400/mo; Enterprise custom | 0.8% of billed amount plus $0.04 per 1K events; custom above that | No public pricing |
| Credit wallet | Yes. Pools, grants, expiry, rollover, purchased top-ups | Yes. Prepaid credits with real-time balance | Yes. Stacked grants and consumption formulas | Yes. Credit burndown from prepaid pools | Yes. Credits plus prepaid and postpaid commits on contracts | Credits defined in policy config; wallet details not documented |
| Reprice actions without a deploy | Yes. Versioned, effective-dated credits-per-action table, edited in the console | No credits-per-action weight table documented | Consumption formulas in the console; no dated weight versions documented | Plan limits editable; no credits-per-action weight table documented | Contract amendments; no credits-per-action weight table documented | Policy config, not code; dated versions not documented |
| Price-per-credit book | Yes. Effective-dated book; grants stamp the book price, negotiated overrides win | Configured per plan; no dated price book documented | Prices stay in your billing provider | Prices stay in Stripe | List pricing with per-contract overrides | Not documented |
| Cost and margin per customer | Yes. Cost rules per feature; margin per customer in the same ledger | Claimed on marketing (/solutions/ai); no cost ledger documented | Not documented | Not documented | Not documented | Yes. Per-call margin with vendor, customer, and feature attribution |
| Internal AI spend (Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Copilot, LiteLLM admin APIs) and Feature P&L | Yes | Not documented | Not documented | Not documented | Not documented | Not documented |
| Customer-facing forecast UI | Yes. Burndown API plus a React widget; depletion date per pool | No forecast UI documented | Paywall and portal widgets; no burn forecast documented | Embeddable plan and usage components; no burn forecast documented | Real-time balance APIs; no forecast UI documented | Not documented |
| Machine-readable public pricing | Yes. pricing.json per catalog: one GET, no auth | No | No | No. Their own docs are agent-readable (llms.txt), your pricing is not | No | No |
| Agent signup and payments (402 flow) | Yes. One-call signup issues a scoped key; 402 with a pollable checkout session id | No | No | No | No. Stripe's agentic commerce work sits at the payments layer, not in Metronome | No |
| MCP surface | Operator tools plus curated customer tools; spend needs explicit confirmation | Operator-facing agent connector for your Orb account | Yes, operator-facing: manages your Stigg environment | Yes, operator-facing: manages your Schematic account | None documented; Stripe's MCP covers payments | None documented |
| Spend caps for agent buyers | Yes. Per-account top-up cap enforced before money moves | No | No | No | No | Caps enforced at call time; no agent-buyer flow documented |

Facts checked September 2, 2026 against each vendor's public docs and pricing
pages. "Not documented" means we could not find it published, not that it
does not exist. Corrections: kat@tansohq.com

## The rows that are not a feature race

Every platform here gives you a console, an API, and in most cases an MCP
server for managing your own account. That is operator tooling. The last
four rows are a different axis: whether your customers' agents get a
surface of their own. An agent shopping on a customer's behalf needs
pricing it can read without a login, a signup call that returns a scoped
key, a payment path that survives a 402 and can be resumed by id, and a
cap on what it can spend. None of the other platforms documents any of
that today. Tanso ships all of it, and the wallet, weight table, and
price book are what make it safe to turn on.

## Different tools for different jobs

**Orb:** usage-based billing at serious event volume with a finance
workflow around it. Strengths: deep metering (250K+ events/sec, custom
SQL metrics), prepaid credits, Adyen behind it since mid-2026.
Weaknesses: custom pricing only, hosted only, no surface for your
customers' agents.

**Stigg:** entitlements and credits as a layer over the billing provider
you already run. Strengths: fast entitlement checks (documented sub-100ms
P95), no-code console, BYOC and air-gapped options. Weaknesses: not open
source, per-entity and per-event fees, MCP manages your Stigg account
rather than serving your buyers' agents.

**Schematic:** Stripe teams that want plans, entitlements, and credit
burndown without hard-coding checks. Strengths: Stripe-native sync,
embeddable components, free under $5K/mo billing volume then a flat
$400/mo, agent-readable docs.
Weaknesses: requires Stripe, hosted only, no cost or margin ledger
documented.

**Metronome:** enterprise consumption contracts: commits, amendments, and
marketplaces at proven scale (OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA). A Stripe
company since January 2026. Weaknesses: 0.8% of billed amount plus event
fees, hosted only, agentic commerce lives at the Stripe payments layer.

**Paid.ai:** companies selling AI agents to enterprises, priced on
outcomes and proven with ROI receipts. Strengths: outcome and per-agent
pricing, margin tracking, SOC 2 / GDPR / HIPAA / ISO 27001. Weaknesses:
hosted only, not open source, and it bills the humans who buy your
agents; it gives no surface to agents buying from you.

**Limitr:** AI products that want usage gated and margin measured at call
time, on top of whatever bills the customer. Strengths: per-call margin
with vendor, customer, and feature attribution, limits enforced in your
process before the vendor call, Apache-2.0 engine on GitHub with a
TypeScript SDK (@formata/limitr). Weaknesses: no public pricing, not a
billing system (invoicing stays elsewhere), no agent-buyer flow or MCP
documented.

**Tanso:** products that want their features usable by their customers'
agents, with the billing machinery that makes that safe to turn on.
Strengths: public pricing.json, one-call agent signup, 402 with a
pollable checkout session id, spend caps, curated MCP tools, versioned
weight table and price book changeable without a deploy, margin per
customer in one ledger, open source self-hosted with no vendor bill.
Weaknesses: newest here, smallest feature surface, self-host only, no
SLA, no SOC 2, Stripe-only payments.

## Links

- [Tanso source](https://github.com/tansohq/tanso-oss) · [docs](https://tanso.mintlify.app)
- [Limitr](https://limitr.dev) · [source](https://github.com/dev-formata-io/limitr)
- [Tanso vs. Lago vs. Autumn (open-source peers)](https://tansohq.com/md/compare.md)
- [HTML version of this page](https://tansohq.com/compare/billing-platforms)