Get an audit

Head to head · Usage billing · October 2026 research run

Orb vs Paid

Orb scores 66.5 (B) on agent readiness against Paid's 55.1 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Paid leads on security & auth and payments & pricing. Both do usage billing.

Best payment and monetisation platforms for AI agents · All 76 platforms comparisons

OrbOrb, Inc. · HTTP API B66.5/100#289 of 950 PaidAgent Paid Limited · HTTP API C55.1/100#669 of 950

Which one, for what

Orb B

Good for A software or AI company that bills on usage and needs event metering, plan versioning, prepaid credits, invoicing and revenue reporting behind one API, with Stripe or Adyen collecting the money.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 77 against 35
  • Schema & documentation, 88 against 64
  • Agent ergonomics, 84 against 70
  • Maintenance & community, 82 against 77
  • Transparency & trust, 65 against 51

Watch for

All three plans (Core, Advanced, Enterprise) show custom pricing only, and the pricing page sends new customers to sales

Paid C

Good for A team selling an AI agent that needs usage metering, credit balances, cost and margin tracking and invoicing in one service, with Stripe as the payment rail.

Ahead on

  • Security & auth, 65 against 55
  • Payments & pricing, 30 against 5

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

The docs index advertises an OpenAPI 3.1 file at two addresses, and both returned 404 on 9 October 2026

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runOrbPaidEdge
Reliability16%207735Orb +42
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28864Orb +24
Agent ergonomics13%16.28470Orb +14
Security & auth14%17.55565Paid +10
Payments & pricing10%12.5530Paid +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88277Orb +5
Transparency & trust7%8.86551Orb +14
Negative events≤1500
Total66.5 · B55.1 · C

Facts side by side

FactOrbPaid
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorOrb, Inc.Agent Paid Limited
Hosted endpointhttps://api.withorb.com/v1https://api.agentpaid.io/api/v2
TransportsHTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingPaidFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Orb's Platform Terms and Conditions. The SDKs on GitHub are Apache-2.0Proprietary service under Paid's Master Subscription Agreement. The Node and Python SDKs on GitHub are MIT
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-092026-09-15
Terms last updated2024-11-13no date given
Privacy policy last updated2025-05-07no date given
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot found in the text
Popularity5 stars, 185k npm/wk24k npm/wk

Verdicts

Orb

Orb suits a company that bills on usage and wants one API for events, plans, credits and invoices. It publishes an OpenAPI 3.1 file, numeric rate limits, idempotency keys and a dry-run header. Every plan is priced on request and access starts with sales. No scope list for API keys or public sub-processor list was found.

Paid

Paid suits a builder who wants usage metering, credits and invoicing behind one API, with restricted and customer-bound keys, OAuth on the MCP server and a free plan that needs no card. No status page, SLA figure, API changelog or rate-limit numbers were found, both advertised OpenAPI links returned 404, and card payments need the builder's own Stripe account.

Before you call either

Orb

  1. Call https://api.withorb.com/v1 with Authorization: Bearer <key>. A person creates the key in the Orb web app under organisation settings, in test mode or live mode
  2. Send an Idempotency-Key of at most 64 characters on every POST and PATCH. A 409 means the first request is still running or the body changed
  3. Add Dry-Run: True to check a write first, and confirm Orb-Dry-Run: true in the response. Ingest, amend and deprecate event calls ignore it and run for real
  4. Do not send Idempotency-Key with Dry-Run. Orb returns a validation error
  5. Page with limit (default 20, maximum 100) and pass next_cursor back as cursor while has_more is true
  6. Back off exponentially on 429. Test mode allows 5 writes a second and 2,000 ingested events a minute

Paid

  1. Call https://api.agentpaid.io/api/v2 with Authorization: Bearer <key>. A person creates the first key at app.paid.ai. No programmatic signup was found
  2. Give every signal a stable idempotencyKey and resend the same key on retry. Signals without one are not deduplicated
  3. Send at most 500 signals a request. A 429 rejects the whole batch, so wait for Retry-After and resend it all
  4. Read the code field on a 429. CONCURRENCY_LIMIT_EXCEEDED carries no Retry-After and clears when an analytics query finishes
  5. Install the Python SDK as paid-python, the name in its README and pyproject.toml. The quickstart's pip install paid names a package we could not check

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Orb or Paid?

Orb scores 66.5 (B) on agent readiness against Paid's 55.1 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Paid leads on security & auth and payments & pricing.

Do Orb and Paid need an API key?

Orb needs an API key. Paid takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Orb and Paid without installing anything?

Yes. Orb has a hosted endpoint at https://api.withorb.com/v1 and Paid at https://api.agentpaid.io/api/v2.

Other comparisons with Orb or Paid

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.

Get an auditSee a sample report