In-person meetup: Billing and observability

The SaaS Developer community will be getting together to snack on Pizza, get to know each other, and exchange opinions on critical topics for every SaaS - Observing system usage and billing customers.

We'll spend the first 30 minutes snacking and networking, and then we'll kick things off with the first public announcement of: SaaS Builder Toolkit (SBT) - an open-source developer toolkit that streamlines building SaaS, and enables you to create reusable plugins with your own products.

After that, we have two fantastic presentations:

The Joy of Usage Based Billing
Kshitij Grover, co-founder and CTO of Orb, and Arsh Khandelwal, founding engineer leading Orb's infrastructure, will discuss:

• The rising adoption of usage based pricing strategies and specifically amongst AI teams
• Motivations for building Orb: founded based on the experience my co-founder faced building a billing system at Asana (a 3 month project ➡ 14th month project)
• Common technical challenges teams face when building a usage based billing system in-house
• Benefits of adopting a usage based billing model: increased customer transparency, value driven metrics, ability to make price changes at scale
• Examples of why some of our customers moved to usage based model

Workflow Engines: A Different Take on Distributed Tracing
Colt McNealy, the most active member of the SaaS Developer will present his slightly biased view toward observable micro services architecture:
In the world of microservice observability, distributed tracing is critical to be able to understand how all of your services work together. There are tools like Zipkin and Kiali to monitor network traffic for direct RPC's, and it's even possible to trace traffic through Kafka using OpenTelemetry. However, instrumenting existing workloads isn't the only way to figure out What's Going On. What if your architecture had traceability straight out of the box? That is one of the promises of durable execution engines, and Colt will show us how it works in his OSS workflow engine - LittleHorse.