# Orb vs Paid (slim)

> Orb scores 66.5 (B) to Paid's 55.1 (C) for usage billing. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/orb-vs-paid.md (~2,400 tokens) · this version ~680 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/orb-vs-paid.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/orb-vs-paid
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

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.

- Orb: B 66.5, rank #289 of 950 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/orb.min.md
- Paid: C 55.1, rank #669 of 950 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/paid.min.md
- Orb, 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.
- Paid, 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 Free to start without a card.

| Category | Orb | Paid |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 77 | 35 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 88 | 64 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 84 | 70 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 55 | 65 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 5 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 82 | 77 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 65 | 51 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Orb | Paid |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Orb, Inc. | Agent Paid Limited |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.withorb.com/v1` | `https://api.agentpaid.io/api/v2` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Orb's Platform Terms and Conditions. The SDKs on GitHub are Apache-2.0 | Proprietary service under Paid's Master Subscription Agreement. The Node and Python SDKs on GitHub are MIT |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-09 | 2026-09-15 |
| Terms last updated | 2024-11-13 | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-05-07 | no date given |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 5 stars, 185k npm/wk | 24k npm/wk |