Pricing Strategies: #1 Nuances in Pricing

When Clara first opened her digital printing shop, pricing was simple. She sold handmade greeting cards, planners, business cards, and other physical items at fixed label prices, individually and in bulk. One SKU, one price, one bill, and that's all it took.

But as business grew, people started using digital signage and boards, and customers wanted more than just a one-time product from Clara. They needed event invites designed, corporate gift packages, annual print subscriptions, and even on-demand branding services for special occasions.

Suddenly, pricing wasn't simple anymore.

A business card might cost $2, but designing a wedding card set is a one-time creative service. Corporate print delivery repeats monthly, with many customisations. Branding projects take multiple stages before they're finalised. For Bulk orders, it requires a tiered or usage-based pricing slab. Clara had transformed into a mixed-model business that offers products, services, and subscriptions based on vendors and projects.

Clara realised that the pricing is no longer just numbers but a strategy to be well-crafted and executed.

Challenge with Evolving Business Models 

Most businesses eventually reach a point like Clara.

• They sell physical/commercial goods at fixed pricing.

• They offer one-time services with one-time service pricing.

• They move to subscription revenue, where it is recurring or usage-based pricing.

• They handle custom work under milestone or project-based pricing.

​Every model has its own billing rhythm, revenue pattern, taxation logic, discount rules, and contract structure. And managing each manually in a spreadsheet or with individual tools for each invoicing model will be nothing but chaotic.

​
You need to be flexible with structure. You need a system that lets your pricing evolve without friction.

Zoho Billing is built for businesses that change, grow, experiment, and scale without burning time restructuring pricing.

Product/Physical Goods Pricing

For businesses that sell tangible items, pricing needs to be predefined and easily accessible at the point of sale. In Zoho Billing, you can configure each product as an item with its rate, unit, and tax preference, making invoicing a two-click process. Whether someone buys one note or 200, you don't need to remember pricing manually it;s already available and accurate. The convenience lies in setting it up once and using it multiple times across different invoices.

Tips: Turn pricing into a system that instantly recalls. The faster the invoice is generated, the faster the payment flows. Predefined product pricing reduces negotiation time, improves customer confidence, and supports sales growth without operational hiccups.

One-Time Service Pricing

When your service is delivered once, for instance, design work, installation, gardening, etc, you need a smooth way to charge for it without building a new billing structure every time. With Zoho Billing, one-time services can be created as items with fixed or variable billing units, making invoicing as simple as adding the service line. Instead of calculating cost per job repeatedly, pricing becomes standardised, repeatable and instant. You deliver value once, and billing follows instantly with clarity.

Tips: Productise service. When pricing is packaged, it becomes easier to pitch, scale and repeat. Billing isn't an afterthought; it becomes a part of your service proposition itself.

Subscription Ongoing Services Pricing

As a business scales, recurring revenue often becomes a significant source of income—through monthly retainers, annual supply contracts, maintenance services, SaaS offerings, etc. Zoho Billing allows you to convert services into subscription plans with predefined billing cycles, renewal trial options, and add-ons. Once configured, the system automates invoicing at scheduled intervals. All you need to do is define pricing once, and Zoho Billing bills on your behalf.

Tips: Build predictability. A subscription model isn't just about charging periodically. It's about removing effort from revenue collection. Once pricing is defined, the system manages recurring invoices while your focus shifts to delivery, retention, and scaling.

Project Pricing

Projects are dynamic, and the pricing varies based on time, milestones, and additional expenses. Zoho Billing helps manage these complexities by letting you bill based on hours worked, tasks completed, or pre-agreed stages. You can even link costs and convert them directly into a claimable invoice item. Instead of manually tracking across documents, everything feeds into one billing workflow. Project process, expense add-up, and invoice are reflected transparently, with pricing already defined and ready to deploy.

Tips: Balance freedom with financial clarity. When pricing models adapt to project scope without backtracking into manual recalculation, you win two battles at once: delivery agility and revenue accuracy. Every hour, every task, and every expense converts into billable value without delay or data loss.

What Pricing Flexibility Offers to Businesses 

Business growth introduces multiple revenue models, but with Zoho Billing, each can be priced, pre-configured, and billed effortlessly. Whether you're selling goods, delivering services, managing subscription contracts, or long-term projects, pricing remains consistent, organised, and, on top of it all, completely scalable.

As a business, pricing is not just what you charge; it's how effectively and smoothly you present it to the customer. 

Up Next: Plan your service offering with 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

• Integration Request: Elementor

  Integrating Zoho CRM forms with Elementor, the most popular page builder on Wordpress, would be great. I use it for our site, goenergylink.com, and I have had to use Zapier webhooks to be able to connect it with Elementor. The one issue I have run into

• Ability to Change Visibility of Published YouTube Videos

  Hi Zoho Social Team, How are you? We would like to request an enhancement in Zoho Social regarding the management of already published youtube videos. Currently, after publishing a youtube video through Zoho Social, there is no option to change its visibility

• Adding anchor links in Zoho CRM email templates

  I know you can add anchor link in Campaigns, but I dont see the option to that in the CRM email template. Am I missing something?

• openUrl in blueprints

  My customer wants to open a URL at the end of a blueprint transition. Seems this isn't possible right now but it would be very useful. In this thread, https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/topic/openurl-not-working the Zoho agent said that it's logically

• Ability to Add YouTube Video to Playlist During Publishing

  Hi Zoho Social Team, How are you? While publishing YouTube videos through Zoho Social, we noticed that the platform currently does not allow selecting a playlist at the time of publishing. Instead, we can only add the video to a playlist after it has

• Introducing Zoho Creator's 2025 Release Projection 2

  Hello Creators! I'm Prakash, from the Creator product management team, and today I'm delighted to unveil our next set of features as part of Release Projection 2 for 2025. With thoughtful analysis and planning, we've curated powerful new capabilities

• Sharing Form Ownership Among Multiple Users

  I would really like the ability to share form ownership among multiple users. It's frustrating to me that if a co-worker wants to make an edit to a form, I have to transfer ownership to them. It would be great if forms could act like google forms, where multiple people can edit a form and view responses. 

• Marketer’s Space - Ace Your Spooky-Season Marketing with Pre-designed Templates in Zoho Campaigns

  Hello marketers, Welcome back to another post in Marketer’s Space! We’re in Q4, which means that you have endless opportunities to connect with your audience, starting with Halloween campaigns! In this post, we’ll show you how to design the perfect Halloween

• Zia expands to China with native features and DeepSeek-powered generative AI features

  Hello everyone, We are glad to support Zia native features and Zia generative AI features for our customers in China. From hereon, all AI-features in Desk will be accessible in China data center with the integration of DeepSeek generative AI model. DeepSeek

• Email in each module

  We have a contact ,module which then has a link to customer assets which in turn the asset has a multiple link to service visits. When we link assets to customers we choose by name and it brings over the associate email via the lookup. Great feature.

• Introducing Skill-Based Ticket Assignment

  The goal of every support team is to provide great support, and to do so as fast as they can. To make this possible, it is important that agents spend their time judiciously, especially when they're dealing with a large number of tickets of varying urgency

• Kaizen #213 - Workflow APIs - Part 1

  Welcome to another week of Kaizen! If you have ever managed complex business processes, you know that Workflows are the quiet backbone of any well-run business process. They keep things moving; assigning owners, sending alerts, keeping deals on track,

• Browser and address bar hide

  Hi, How i can do hide the address bar with browser headline when i am working on the sheet, because i am using (freeze panes) which i want visible for full work. For your reference here i am attached the screen shot and marked yellow lines which really

• Cells Border

  Hi I am using Zoho Sheet on S Tab , is there any option to make all border of any cell at once. I think this is very basic which we are missing. This is available in mobile but not in tab or suggest if i am missing this function. And for Tab can you give

• Zobot and Sales IQ

  What will happen to the Zoho Sales IQ being integrated to the website after creating the Zobot on the website too

• Help Center and SEO: Any Benefit to My Domain-Mapped Website Ranking?

  First of, I love the Help Center which I've just decided to integrate into my website to replace its old-fashioned FAQs. So much more to achieve there now! Lots of new benefits to the site visitors and to me in terms of organizing and delivering all the

• Support french language options

  Greetings, I want to use Zoho with the french language portal, however the supplied translation is not very good (google translate). There are many basic mistakes on the main most important sections (my requests, submit a request). Is there a way for

• Introducing the Workflow and Actions APIs for Zoho CRM

  We are absolutely thrilled to announce the release of Workflow APIs and Actions APIs in Zoho CRM’s v8 API suite! This powerful new set of endpoints gives developers unprecedented programmatic control over business automation. For years, Workflow Rules

• Zoho Form URL displays incorrect name

  Hi, I have a form I created called "Design Request form". It displays this way everywhere I look. However, in the URL, it shows up as "DesignJobRequestFormFINAL011325PROOFV1B" and I'm not sure why. I can't find where to fix this. Does anyone have any

• Consumers are talking about your business. Are you listening?👂

  A loyal customer might be praising your product in a forum. A frustrated user could be posting a harsh review on a public site. An excited partner may have left a comment on your campaign. A domain expert might be deconstructing your product. A prospect

• What counts as a Temp for Billing Purposes in Workerly

  I'm considering trying this product but am not sure how the temp count is used for billing purposes. For example, if we keep a large data base of 500 potential workers.....are we billed for that or only if they are assigned to a client at a given point

• Cold emails not allowed?

  I planned to use Zoho Mail to send businesses some cold emails to offer my freelance writing services, but I noticed that the anti-spam policy is very strict -- no commercial emails whatsoever without prior permission from the recipient? I would be very

• Form name incorrectly displayed in URL

  Hi, I have a form I created called "Design Request form". It displays this way everywhere I look. However, in the URL, it shows up as "DesignJobRequestFormFINAL011325PROOFV1B" and I'm not sure why. I can't find where to fix this. Does anyone have any

• I can't receive mail

  Hello, I can't receive e-mail. I no longer receive e-mails to the e-mail I received for ​my site. I also edited the DNS settings, but it doesn't work at all.

• 1‑to‑1 invite missing post-setup (needs re-invite) vs channel invite auto-joins without business prompt

  1. Zoho Cliq 1‑to‑1 external invite The inviter sent a 1‑to‑1 invite to an invitee who didn’t have a Cliq account. After the invitee completed account setup and created a business/organization, the website redirected them to Cliq, where they opened Cliq

• 【開催報告】東京 ユーザー交流会 Vol.3 2025/10/17 Zoho サービスの活用促進を外部ツールとの連携で実現！

  ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。コミュニティチームの藤澤です。 10月17日(金)に新橋で「東京 ユーザー交流会 Vol.3」を開催しました。ご参加くださったユーザーの皆さま、ありがとうございました！ この投稿では、当日のセッションの様子や使用した資料を紹介しています。残念ながら当日お越しいただけなかった方も、ぜひチェックしてみてください😊 ユーザー活用事例セッション：Zoho Flowと決済システムの連携 あみろくの岡島さんに、Zoho サービスの活用事例として、Zoho Flow を活用した外部サービスとの連携事例をご共有いただきました。

• received email opens in a new tab every time I log in

  as per the title: since about when I first made my email account, every single time Ive logged in to view my inbox, a new tab opens for an email I viewed once as if restoring a closed session. I thought I just didnt understand the "starting up" settings

• Engage with your customers at scale using WhatsApp Marketing Template messages

  Hi everyone, To make it easier for organizations to communicate with customers, Desk now allows you to send individual, mass, and bulk WhatsApp template messages from both the Ticket and Contact modules. How is this going to benefit your business? WhatsApp

• Importation Tickets error

  Hi, I'm newbie here 🤓 So, i'm importing data from csv, but when I try advance to mapping fields the importer tool show this message: Previously I try import, other data, and not show errors in this step. Some ideas? Best Regards,

• Showing description in timesheet and timelogs.

  I am wondering if it’s possible in version 5 of Zoho People to have the description show by default or with a manipulation on the user’s part. Let me show you what I mean. As you can see this is the view for the users. Now if they want to see the full

• Workaround: openURL in Blueprints - An alternate approach

  There is a roundabout way to open a URL in blueprints after a save event. By using the 'onBeforeMandatoryFormSave' in Client Script, you can open an external URL. Now, the problem is, this is designed to be run BEFORE the blueprint is saved, not after,

• MTD SA in the UK

  Hello ID 20106048857 The Inland Revenue have confirmed that this tax account is registered as Cash Basis In Settings>Profile I have set ‘Report Basis’ as “Cash" However, I see on Zoho on Settings>Taxes>Income Tax that the ‘Tax Basis’ is marked ‘Accrual'

• Migrate file from Single File Upload to Multi File Upload

  Dears, I have created a new field Multi File Upload to replace the old Single File Upload field. I'd like to ask you guys what is the best way to migrate the files to the new field?

• Open "Live Chat" from a hyperlink?

  Hi, I often write paragraphs and text on our company website, and usually say you can get in touch with us via live chat. Can the chat window be triggered to pop open without clicking the chat graphic in the bottom window, and use it in a hyperlink? ie:

• Zoho Sites search box

  Is there a Search box that can be added to a Zoho site? It would be for searching within the site only.

• What stops me from packaging and shipping an order when the inventory is negative?

  It seems if the inventory value is negative, that Zoho Inventory should not allow me to create a Package and Ship it.   But, there seems to be nothing to stop me from doing that other than when I go to physically package the item and realize that there is no stock. There also seems to be nothing on the screen that even indicates to me that I should not package and ship.  To me this is the fundamental point of an inventory system.  Am I doing something wrong?   

• Conditional formatting based on another field

  Hi I have two fields on my form stage 1 complete and stage 1 deadline.  I am trying to setup conditional formatting so that if stage 1 complete is after stage 1 deadline the record is highlighted in red. I need both stage 1 complete and stage 1 deadline

• The sending IP (136.143.188.15) is listed on spamrl.com as a source of spam.

  Hi, it just two day when i am using zoho mail for my business domain, today i was sending email and found that message "The sending IP (136.143.188.15) is listed on https://spamrl.com as a source of spam" I hope to know how this will affect the delivery

• Changing a Single-Line Text field into a Multi-line Field without losing data

  Is it possible to change a Single-Line Text field into a Multi-line Field without losing data. I have a module with data for which I would like to change a single-line field into a multi-line field but I'm worried it might delete the pre-existing da

• Webhook - Google Sheets

  I have 2 forms that are both integrated with Google Sheets. I've set up a webhook to pull form 1 data from Google Sheets to prefill data in Form 2. The issue I have is that the forms name fields are First Name & Last Name but the Google sheets integration

• Next Page