Table of Contents
Pricing tools and usage monetization
Moving quickly with flexible pricing tools and usage monetization
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Get to market faster
Your business needs to move quickly and easily evolve your products, services, and pricing strategies — and the complex billing that goes with it — to stay competitive and deliver ongoing value that will retain and grow customers.
Modern billing software should support any combination of pricing models to help your business stay agile and evolve with changing demands. Even if this isn’t a major focus for your company today, business trends indicate that it likely will be in the near future. You don’t want to have to rip out and replace a system that can’t scale with you.
Look for billing software that allows you to quickly respond to customer and market demands by quickly testing and pivoting one-time, recurring, or usage-based pricing.
Not all solutions are created equally
To design your own flexible pricing strategy, you’ll need billing software that has a proven track record of supporting:
- Support for a mix of pricing models: Test and pivot any combination of one-time, recurring, or usage-based pricing.
- Low code/no code flexible pricing tools: Easily design, deploy, and iterate on pricing and packaging to stay competitive.
- Streamlined usage monetization: An end-to-end solution for usage data ingestion, metering, tracking, billing, and visibility.
- A scalable, easy-to-use API-first approach: Scale transactions as your business grows without any impact on performance.
Tip
Subscribers value flexibility
In a recent Subscribed Institute and Harris Poll joint consumer survey, 80% of respondents said that flexibility in purchasing options for recurring products and services was either important, very important or absolutely essential. And when asked about the ways they prefer to pay, across generations, consumers expressed interest in a variety of options.
Zuora’s Understanding the Modern Subscriber report provides in-depth insights into the preferences of today’s consumer.
Create effective promotions
In today’s fast-moving, competitive landscape, it’s imperative to have a variety of promotional options on hand to help boost sales. Modern billing software should make it easy to create percentage-based discounts, fixed discounts, and offer free trials. Plus, you can easily manage and distribute promo codes to your customers, and track the effectiveness of refining marketing strategies.
Look for a solution that supports out-of-the-box promotions like:
- % of Discount
- Fixed Discount
- Free Trial
- VIP Discount
- Promo Codes
- Commitment
Comprehensive usage metering and rating
Your organization will need to scale to support modern monetization models, such as consumption or usage pricing, but oftentimes, IT can’t support this with the system architecture they have in place. It isn’t unusual for IT to be backlogged with a number of other projects, and when they do get around to tackling a usage billing project, the knee jerk reaction may be to build the infrastructure. However, this can take months — even years. But you need to launch your pricing strategy now.
As you search for a new billing solution, it’s critical to consider one with a built-in usage metering and rating component, so you can support any monetization model — from billing through to accounting — and make IT’s job easier.
While some vendors only offer basic usage metering, a true end-to-end solution will provide all the out-of-the-box tools your business needs to collect, transform, measure, and rate usage data.
Look for billing software that supports:
- Efficient data ingestion, metering, and rating in real-time: Integral to the success of a usage-based business model is the ability to ingest and transform raw data from any source in any format. Look for a solution that allows you to quickly stream large amounts of usage data in near real-time and route it for rating and billing or store it in a data warehouse.
- Quickly iterate on pricing and packaging strategies: To successfully launch and scale a usage-based model you’ll need to be able to quickly pivot pricing and packaging strategies. Look for a solution that supports a large array of no-code/low-code pricing models right out of the box, but also gives you the option to extend any charge model with custom code multi-attribute logic.
- Continuous visibility and transparency: As part of your usage model, you’ll need to keep your customers informed with proactive threshold notifications and APIs to surface consumption data within customer portals, ensuring they have up-to-date information on their usage. Look for a solution that provides overage insights to forecast expected revenue and impact on customers.
Tip
Prepare for the rise in demand for usage-based pricing
According to a recent Subscribed Institute and Harris Poll joint consumer survey, usage-based pricing is an important tool, and critical for certain product categories.
Read the full report to find out what the data reveals about which industries may benefit the most from these models and why we may be on the cusp of a broader wave of consumers seeking usage-based options.
Iterating on pricing metrics and models for AI offers
As artificial intelligence (AI) and Generative AI (GenAI) continue to revolutionize multiple industries, effective monetization strategies are a vital ingredient for companies to keep up with adoption and sustain growth. Balancing innovation with sustainable revenue models, while also ensuring customer satisfaction and market competitiveness is paramount.
The Future of GenAI Pricing
Uncover the spectrum of GenAI pricing metrics utilized by leaders in the space and learn the winning strategies to price your AI offerings.
Monetizing GenAI
Uncover the emerging trends in GenAI pricing and packaging and discover why many SaaS companies may be missing out.
Design a pricing strategy as agile as your go-to-market
As artificial intelligence (AI) and Generative AI (GenAI) continue to revolutionize multiple industries, effective monetization strategies are a vital ingredient for companies to keep up with adoption and sustain growth. Balancing innovation with sustainable revenue models, while also ensuring customer satisfaction and market competitiveness is paramount.
Flexible pricing — what it is, why it matters, and how to do it right
Flexible pricing is more than just choosing different pricing models. Our step-by-step guide provides best practices to empower you to design your own comprehensive flexible pricing strategy.
Learn more about billing software
You know you need a new billing system, but how will it fit in with your existing tech stack? To maximize the effectiveness of your billing software, it’s essential that it integrates with other core business systems and can scale over time as your business grows and changes.
Keep reading to learn more about the integrations and extensibility you should expect from modern billing software.
