Pricing Strategies: #2 Plan your Service Offerings using Plans

Meet Harvey & Mia, hailing from the same Tech school, carrying the dream of setting up their own IT maintenance firm in their location. They drew up a clear business plan and put their business in motion on New Year's Eve. They had great reception right from the beginning. Harvey was a little concerned about investing in a back-office solution and decided to work with basic tools for customer management, invoicing, and reporting.

Whereas Mia, even though she had a similar start to Harvey, liked to experiment and get into solid back office solutions upfront. Months went by, and the customer base grew to nearly a thousand.

"Another month, another batch of invoices.. "

That's what Harvey sighed every time he sat down to prepare billing for his IT maintenance clients. Every month looked the same: scan last month's invoice, tweak a few numbers, re-check the values, send again. But as his business grew, so did the inconsistencies. Some clients increased their usage, some reduced it, and some added new devices in the mid-month. Yet, his recurring invoices didn't reflect these nuances unless he manually intervened.

Meanwhile, his friend Mia seemed to scale effortlessly. Her billing wasn't tired of recurring invoices at all. She used subscription plans. Instead of repeating invoices, she packaged her offerings into structured plans that made sense to her customers. She presented multiple plans, each with a clear scope, usage allowance, and pricing model. Customers subscribed, upgraded, downgraded or extended without requiring Mia to rebuild or recalculate an invoice. Her billing ran on autopilot most of the time, while Harvey found himself buried in month-end edits.

This contrast highlights the importance of being ready for the shift, especially if you are offering services. Recurring invoices keep generating revenue, but subscription plans build businesses and help you strategise your sales.

Subscription Plans Vs Recurring Invoices 

Recurring invoices repeat a charge. They don't really understand usage, limits, upgrades, downgrades or changes in the billing cycle. In contrast, Plans in Zoho Billing is designed to inherit usage, limits, and amendments, and to provide room for scaling.

Recurring Invoices	Subscription Plans
Every billing cycle needs manual oversight.	Billing is automated based on a predefined frequency.
Pricing adjustments require editing the template.	Pricing is structured by tiers or units.
Usage changes are tracked separately.	Upgrades and downgrades are seamless and prorated.
Customers have little clarity on what's included and what's not.	Customers understand precisely what they're paying for.
Scaling takes lots of admin effort.	Scaling becomes operationally effortless.

 

Tips: If you deliver services regularly, you can experiment by productising your services into plans rather than billing them as recurring invoices. It simplifies billing and strengthens your offerings.

Plans: The Foundation of Subscription-Based Billing 

A subscription plan is more than a price bracket. It's a packaged version of your ongoing services. It defines,

• What does the customer receive?

• How often are they billed?

• Does the usage limit apply?

• How do pricing changes as they scale?

 It transforms your service into a structured offering your customers can choose from, compare and grow with.

Zoho Billing arguably offers the best plan configuration for every service industry, from SaaS to membership, fintech, and consulting.

Different Pricing Models for Plans 

Subscription plans are not always a single plan. You are free to add as many plans for the service as you like, with different inclusions and limitations for each.  Zoho Billing allows multiple pricing models that help your services evolve naturally.

Flat Pricing

Flat pricing suits businesses whose service value remains consistent every month. Customers pay a fixed, recurring amount regardless of usage, providing simplicity for customers and stability for businesses.

Best Fit for:

• Field Services or pre-booked services.

• Legal or Accounting Services.

• Financial services.

• Memberships

Strategic Advantage:

Flat pricing reduces customer decision-making and makes your offering easy to understand and market.

Unit-Based Pricing

This pricing is transparent and straightforward. It allows you to charge your clients per user, per device, per site or per hour.

Best Fit for:

• IT services.

• HR or accounting services.

• Maintenance industries.

Strategic Advantage:

Unit price gives clarity, and customers instantly understand what they're paying for.

Tier-Based Pricing

This pricing model allows you to charge exactly based on the pricing tier. Customers move through predefined tiers based on usage (eg, hours, tickets, devices, etc). Each tier has its own price and benefits.

Best Fit for:

• Growing teams with varying usage.

• Service levels such as Basic, Standard, and Premium.

Strategic Advantage:

Tier creates a natural upgrade path and fair, usage-based billing.

Volume-Based Pricing

This pricing method provides a single rate based on total usage. This provides the convenience of offering lower rates for high-volume purchases.

Best Fit for:

• Device management

• Bulk service consumption.

Strategic Advantage:

Volume pricing encourages customers to consume more to unlock better pricing.

Package-Based Pricing

Packaging typically means combining one or more services into fixed bundles. This is popular as it appears to be more value for money.

Best Fit for:

• SaaS Businesses

• Streaming Services.

Strategic Advantage:

Package or bundle pricing increases product/service perceived value and simplifies decision-making.

 What Subscription Plans Do for Your Business 

Implementing plans shifts your service from "bill me monthly" to "subscribe to what fits me". It enhances customer experience and streamlines your operations.

With plans, your business gains predictable and stable recurring revenue. It automates changes to the subscription, including upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations. It makes it easy for customers to scale based on their requirements.

For CFOs and CEOs, Zoho Billing provides reports based on plans that envision the possible positioning of their product/service based on pricing, location, region or customer purchase behaviour.

That's the real power of subscription plans. They turn recurring services into recurring growth with more structured, predictable and strategically aligned for scale. 

Up Next: Services Never Stop with just Plans.

• Topic Participants

• Hari Hara Sudhan. S

  

• Sticky Posts

• Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020

  Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here's

• Community Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly you

• Community Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate most

• Introducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! ​ Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides

• Recent Topics

• Boost your Zoho Desk's performance by archiving tickets!

  The longer your help desk operations are, the more likely it is to accumulate tickets that are no longer relevant. For example, ticket records from a year ago are typically less relevant than currently open tickets. Such old tickets may eventually lead

• Paste emails to create segment

  We are moving over from Mailchimp to ZOHO. However Mailchimp allows me to create a segment by pasting in emails from excel (or importing a .csv) can I do the same in Mailchimp?

• Getting the Record ID of a form once it is submitted - so that form can be edited later

  In Zoho Forms, where can I access the record ID of a form once the form is submitted? - Record ID is not available in webhook payloads - It is not available to form fields, including in formulas - It is not available as a parameter in a thankyou page

• Auto-Generate Line Numbers in Item Table Using HTML & CSS Counters (Zoho Books & Zoho Inventory Custom Templates)

  <div> <style> /* Start counter from 0 inside tbody */ tbody#lineitem { counter-reset: rowNumber; } /* Increment counter for each row */ tbody#lineitem tr { counter-increment: rowNumber; } /* Show counter value in first column */ tbody#lineitem tr td:first-child::before

• Possible to define default font and size in Zoho Campaigns?

  Is it possible to define a default font (font, size and colour) for the text, H1 and H2 in Zoho Campaigns? For example: In a campaign, I add a text block, and the text is automatically century gothic, size 11, grey (6f6f6e) by default? Thank you!

• Zoho Sites - General Feedback

  Hi Everyone-- Quick question for discussion: is it me or is working with Zoho Sites like entering the Twilight Zone? I've built many sites over the years, but this platform seems impossible. I've spent an entire day and a half trying to get a simple one-color

• Zoho People & Zoho CRM Calendar

  Hi, Does anyone know if it is possible to link Zoho People and the calendar in CRM? I would like when holidays are approved they automatically appear in the calendar on CRM. Thanks 

• File Upload field not showing in workflow

  Hi, I have added a field on Zoho CRM. I want to use it in a workflow where that particular field is updated based on another field, however it is not showing up in the field list to select it in the workflow. Why is this please?

• You cannot send this email campaign as it doesn't have any eligible contacts in the selected mailing list. You can try adding contacts or choose other mailing lists.

  please help

• Strengthening the capabilities of CommandCenter in Zoho CRM Plus

  When you look at the prospect-to-customer journey in most businesses 10 to 15 years ago, it was relatively straightforward. Many of us remember walking into a store, sharing our requirements with a sales associate, reviewing a few options, and making

• World date & time format

  Hello, Is there a timeline to get the worldwide used date and time format ? I mean not the american one... I mean day month year, and 24 hours clock. Regards

• Announcing Kiosk 1.1 - Customize screen titles, configure new fields & actions, use values from your Kiosk to update fields, and more.

  Hello all We are back again with more enhancements to Kiosk. So what's new? Enhancements made to the Components Add titles for your Kiosk screens and adjust its width to suit your viewing preferences. Three new fields can be added to your screen: Percentage,

• Any recommendations for Australian Telephony Integration providers?

  HI,  I am looking for some advice on phone providers as we are looking to upgrade our phone system, does anybody have experience with any of the Australian providers that integrate with CRM Telephony? So far we are looking at RingCentral and Amazon Connect, and would love to hear feedback on any of the other providers you might have tried.  Thank you

• Zoho Campaigns Workspaces

  Hi, I’m currently working on a Zoho CRM + Zoho Campaigns setup for a franchisee-based organization, where each franchise must only see and use its own contacts. At the moment, franchisees cannot properly access their contact lists in Zoho Campaigns unless

• Limited System because of Limited Number of Fields for Car Dealership

  Dear Zoho Support, we want to have all the information about a car inside of a car record. We want to have Zoho CRM as our single source of truth for our data, but the limited number of fields are not allowing that. The data consist of: technical data

• Newsletter in multiple languages

  Hi We are planning on starting to use Zoho Campaigns for our newsletters. Since we send our newsletters in three languages, I would need the "unsubscribe page" and other pages related to the NL (Thank you page and so on) to be available in different languages

• Fixed assets in Zoho One?

  Hi, We use Zoho Books and have the fixed asset option in it. I started a trial for Zoho One and I do not see that as an option. Is the books that is part of zoho one equivalent to Zoho Books Elite subscription or is it a lesser version? Thanks, Matt

• Set Default Status of Assembly to "Assembled" When Entered in UI

  I've just discovered the new "confirmed" status of Assemblies within Inventory. While I understand the intent of this (allowing for manufacturing planning and raw material stock allocation), it was initially confusing to me when manually entering some

• I need to Record Vatable amount and non vatable amount separately in zoho books in a single line

  I need to Record Vatable amount and non vatable amount separately in zoho books in a single line give me the customisation option and in invoice copy to customer the total amount should be inclusive 5%vat and no need to show the vatable and non vatable

• Sort Legend & stacked bar chart by value

  I'd love to see an option added to sort the legend of graphs by the value that is being represented. This way the items with the largest value in the graph are displayed top down in the legend. For example, let's say I have a large sales team and I create

• Scanned Doc - selecting Item overwrites Rate

  I have a Vendor Invoice which was uploaded to Documents. I select Add To > New Bill. The OCR is actually quite good, but it is reading an Item Description instead of an Item Number. I remove the description and select the correct Item Number... and it

• Timesheet invalid data error

  Getting the "Invalid Date" error when trying to add a time sheet to an appointment in a work order. I initially though the work order was corrupt or something so I deleted the work order and recreated it. I added the first time sheet to the AP and saved

• Convert invoice from zoho to xml with all details

  How to convert an Invoice to XML format with all details

• Any update on adding New Customer Payment Providers who support in store terminal devices?

  Currently there is only one Customer payment provider listed for terminal devices in USA- Everyware. They charge a monthly fee of almost $149 minimum. Will you add other providers - like Zoho Payments or Stripe or Worldpay that would allow integrated

• Dealing With One-Time Customers on Zoho Books

  Hello there! I am trying to figure out a way to handle One-Time customers without having to create multiple accounts for every single one on Zoho Books. I understand that I can create a placeholder account called "Walk-In Customer", for example, but I

• "Temporary" Field Value?

  I have a custom action in Form A report Detail View that passes the Rec ID and updates a Temp Record ID lookup field in the Form B record via openURL (and opens the Form B report in popup) . The updated Temp Record ID field value in Form B is then used

• File Upload field automatically replaces spaces with underscores – support experience

  Hi everyone, I want to share my recent experience regarding the File Upload field behavior in Zoho Creator and my interaction with the Zoho support team. When a user uploads a file, the system automatically renames the document by replacing spaces in

• We Asked, Zoho Delivered: The New Early Access Program is Here

  For years, the Zoho Creator community has requested a more transparent and participatory approach to beta testing and feature previews. Today, I'm thrilled to highlight that Zoho has delivered exactly what we asked for with the launch of the Early Access

• Queries on Project-Based Inventory Consumption and Proforma Invoice in Zoho ERP

  We would appreciate your clarification on how Zoho ERP plans to handle the following: Project-based inventory consumption without itemized sales orders Accurate project cost tracking along with inventory reduction Proforma Invoice usage We look forward

• Applying Excess Payments & Conflict Invoices Due to Cancelled Items

  I’m running into several issues that appear to stem from deeper-than-expected overlap between Zoho Finance (Books/Inventory) and Zoho POS. The level of coupling between these systems seems greater than what was originally communicated, and it’s leading

• Zoho Sprint Backlog View, filter by item status

  Hello, In Zoho Sprints, it would be great to be able filter out specific items in the Backlog based on their status. We would like to track items that were Removed from our backlog without seeing them constantly in the Backlog view, as this view should

• WATERFALL CHART IN ZOHO ANALYTICS

  Hi Team, I would like to know whether Zoho Analytics currently supports a Waterfall Chart as a built-in visualization type. If yes, could you please share the steps to create one? If not, is there any workaround or recommended method to build a Waterfall

• Export contacts from Bigin's mobile app to your Android device

  Hello everyone! We're happy to announce that you can now export customer contacts from the Bigin mobile app to your device. Scenario A small-scale business owner has two pipelines in Bigin—one for procuring raw materials and the other for selling his

• ASAP iOS SDK – Xcode Compatibility Update

  Hello everyone, We have been delivering the ASAP iOS SDK developed using Xcode 16.1 to provide Help Center support within mobile applications. Thus, ASAP iOS SDK versions upto 4.5.8 are compatible with development environments running in Xcode 16.1 and

• Sub form auto field population based on parent form

  I have a parent form called "Sites" with a text field called "Site". I have a subform called "Design Comments" (actual form name "Review Comments") with a lookup field name "Sites1" that looks up from the Sites form. I want the Sites1 lookup field to

• Cloud Setup Solution

  I am here looking for Cloud Setup and Data Migration solution for organization. I also searched this on many different website and found many solutions. We are bit confused to which one to choose. One of my friend suggest me this platform, and i am hoping

• Not able to import transactions from Razorpay

  Hi, tried implementing Razorpay integration with books,also added a webhook, but while this added a razorpay clearing account it does not have any data in it. Neither is it getting updated with new transactions happening on Razorpay. This problem is compounded

• A note-taking app right inside your project management space

  How do you feel when you check off the last task from your to-do list after a long day at work? Euphoric, blissful, satisfied? Now, imagine completing the same checklist from your PM platform, without juggling tools. Sounds simple and handy? That’s exactly

• Email Forwarding: Maintain business continuity

  As an administrator, ensuring uninterrupted email communication is critical when a role-based employee is unavailable due to extended leave or a temporary role change. Emails from customers, partners, and internal teams must continue to be received and

• Tip #61- Collaborate live with Invite Technician- 'Insider Insights'

  Hello Zoho Assist Community! From the series of Technician Console, we will be exploring Session. Let's jump right into a brief overview. We’ve all been there: you’re deep into a complex remote session, and you realize you need a second pair of eyes.

• Next Page