In a move that could reshape how businesses buy and switch SaaS products, a coalition of SaaS vendors and payments providers has circulated a draft specification called the "SaaS Billing Interchange" (SBI). The draft — shared with industry partners and a handful of enterprise customers in May 2026 — defines a set of REST APIs, event schemas and minimum legal terms intended to make subscription portability, cancellation and cross-vendor billing integrations less error-prone and easier to automate.
What the SBI draft covers
The 42-page draft specification focuses on four practical areas that cause frequent friction during vendor changes and integrations:
- Subscription portability: standardized export/import payloads for active subscriptions, entitlements, add-ons and usage tiers to enable faster migration between SaaS vendors or billing platforms.
- Cancellation and one-click offboarding: a machine-readable cancellation API that communicates effective end dates, prorated refunds and retained data obligations.
- Proration and reconciliation: a shared ledger model and event webhooks for billing events (invoices, credits, refunds, usage records) designed to reduce reconciliation errors across marketplaces and resellers.
- Audit and consent metadata: explicit fields for consent timestamps, source-authorized users and audit trails to support compliance and customer disputes.
Who’s behind it — and why now
The draft is the work of a loosely organized industry consortium that includes payments platforms, billing middleware vendors and several large SaaS vendors, according to two people briefed on the draft who asked not to be named because the specification is not yet public. Several enterprise customers were invited to review the draft and provide feedback.
Sources say the impetus is practical: enterprises increasingly subscribe to dozens or hundreds of cloud services, and migrations or procurement-driven vendor changes routinely produce billing complexity — lost credits, double billing, broken entitlements and lengthy reconciliation cycles. Vendors and marketplaces also face duplicated integration work, particularly around proration and refund semantics.
Technical design highlights
The SBI draft builds on established standards where possible. It recommends OAuth2 bearer tokens and OpenID Connect for authentication, JSON:API-style payloads for subscription resources and webhook delivery with retry semantics for event-driven reconciliation.
Notable technical decisions in the draft include:
- A canonical subscription resource with nested entitlement and usage objects to preserve product complexity during export/import.
- Two-tier proration model: vendor-side calculation or canonical ledger entries (line-item debit/credit events) so receiving systems can reconcile without re-calculation.
- Standardized refund status codes and retention-of-funds windows to align expectations between payment processors, resellers and end customers.
Implications for vendors and customers
If widely adopted, SBI could reduce the time and cost of moving subscriptions between vendors, lower integration overhead for channel partners and improve visibility for procurement and finance teams. For customers, the most visible changes would be faster offboarding, clearer refund timing and fewer reconciliation disputes.
For vendors, implementing SBI means exposing new APIs and possibly reworking billing systems that were designed around proprietary data models. Smaller vendors and legacy billing platforms may face non-trivial engineering work to adopt the spec. The draft includes a “compatibility profile” to ease incremental adoption, allowing vendors to support export payloads first and full two-way portability later.
Business and legal questions remain
While the SBI draft aims to reduce frictions, it also raises legal and commercial questions. Who bears liability for lost refunds during migration? How are promotional credits or usage-based discounts preserved? The draft contains recommended contract clauses that allocate certain liabilities, but these are optional and would still need to be negotiated between vendors.
Data privacy is another consideration. The portability payload includes user and tenant metadata; the draft recommends redaction patterns and minimum consent fields but leaves data residency and export compliance to implementers.
Industry reaction and next steps
Responses from the broader SaaS community ranged from cautious optimism to measured skepticism. A procurement lead at a Fortune 200 company who reviewed the draft said the standard “solves a lot of the tedious, manual work we run into during vendor transitions,” but cautioned that its value depends on broad vendor buy-in.
Several billing middleware vendors welcomed the draft, noting it could reduce repeated connector development. Payment processors urged clarity around refund flows and chargeback handling.
The consortium expects to open the draft for public comment in Q3 2026 and aims for a 12–18 month timeline to reach a 1.0 release, according to one person briefed on the project. The group is also exploring a neutral governance model — either an independent foundation or existing standards body stewardship — to avoid vendor-captured control.
What SaaS teams should do now
- Review the draft when it is posted. If your organization is a vendor, do an initial gap analysis of your billing model against the SBI canonical subscription and ledger models.
- Finance and procurement teams should list common migration pain points (proration errors, lost credits) and compare them with the SBI scope to prioritize internal automation.
- Channel and reseller teams should evaluate how interoperability could change contractual models and revenue-sharing mechanics.
The "SaaS Billing Interchange" draft represents a practical, engineering-led attempt to reduce day-to-day frictions in a multi-vendor SaaS world. Whether it succeeds will depend on adoption by billing platforms, payment processors and the largest SaaS vendors — and on resolving the legal and commercial nuances that standardization inevitably surfaces.