Pricing Strategies: #3 Services never Stop with just Plans

Pricing Strategies: #3 Services never Stop with just Plans

"Hey, while you're here, could you also take a look at the vegetable patch?"


Aaron hears that line almost every week.

He runs a small gardening service, the kind where customers subscribe to a simple monthly plan that includes basic maintenance, mowing, watering, trimming and fertilising the greenery around the house. It was a clean plan, easy to quote and deliver. But every visit came with just one more request, which Aaron can hardly deny.

"Can you add some new soil to the corner beds?"

"Do you have time to prune the roses today?"

"Can you install a drip line this month?"

"On, and do you think we could add two more bags of compost next time?"

Aaron would laugh and say, "Sure, but that's not a part of the routine."

Then he'd rather do the work for free, feeling it's a small thing to charge or charge manually, which customers sometimes hesitate to pay or write a note to invoice later, which he misses most of the time.

By the end of the month, his plan-based business no longer looked like a plan. It seems like a collection of unpredictable, scattered requests that his billing system wasn't built to handle.

One day, a customer said, "I wish I could just add these extra things like a topping on a pizza. My plan stays the same, but I choose the extras I want."

That made Aaron realise something: People don't want complicated plans, but they do want flexibility in purchase. They want a solid base plan and the freedom to add the extras that fit their needs.

This is precisely why Zoho Billing offers Add-ons, to keep plans clean while allowing customers to personalise their subscription effortlessly.

Add-ons in Zoho Billing 

Add-ons extend a subscription beyond the base offering. They allow customers to purchase additional value without changing their main plan, while letting businesses scale offerings cleanly. Zoho Billing offers a comprehensive, structured add-on framework that covers different types of add-ons to address real-world subscription challenges.


Standalone Add-ons 

Standalone addons are independent enhancements that customers can attach to their existing plan whenever they prefer. They are meant to offer extra service or features that are not included in the base plan but are commonly requested.


Suitable Businesses: Gardening services, home cleaning services, fitness studios, consulting firms, repair/maintenance services.
IdeaStrategic Advantage: Standalone addons let businesses say "yes" to customer requests immediately without redesigning plans. They boost revenue, reduce complexity, and make offerings more modular.  

Addon Groups 

Addon Groups categorise addons into structured sections. This ensures customers see relevant options, not a long list of unrelated extras. This allows businesses to organise add-ons into meaningful groups, such as garden enhancement, soil services, and irrigation upgrades.


Suitable Businesses: Software platforms with feature bundles, wellness centres offering different service categories, and agencies with add-on service families.
Idea
Strategic Advantage: 
 Grouped addons improve customer experience and help businesses present upsells cleanly, increase adoption without overwhelming the subscribers.  

Recurring Addons 

Recurring addons behave like mini-subscriptions attached to the main plan. They repeat every billing cycle unless removed. These are long-term additions, such as premium service layers, extra recurring hours, monthly replenishments, or ongoing feature unlocks.


Suitable Business: IT service providers, digital content platforms, property maintenance companies, and management services businesses.
IdeaStrategic Advantage: Recurring addons provide predictable recurring revenue and increase customer retention by integrating deeper value into each billing cycle.  

One-time Addons 

These are single-use enhancements that do not renew. They are mostly occasional or emergency requests such as festival cleanup, a one-time plan installation, a deep garden care session or a special consultation.


Suitable Business: Event-based service providers, emergency repair teams, creative agencies, and landscaping services offering seasonal cleanup. 
Idea
Strategic Advantage: One-time add-ons let you capture revenue for specific needs while keeping plans simple. Customers appreciate paying just for what they use.

Quantity-based Addon 

Quantity-based addons allow customers to buy multiple units of a service enhancement. It depends on scaling by volume, such as purchasing more working hours, extra visits, additional fertiliser bags or extra user seats.


Suitable Business: Co-working space selling extra desks, SaaS apps offering additional seats, consulting firms selling extra billable hours, and gardening service selling extra material units.

IdeaStrategic Advantage: This model supports incremental growth, reduces customer friction and increases recurring revenue without modifying the customer's main subscription.  

Usage Addons 

Usage-based addons charge based on the quantity consumed, with tracking after the fact. This addon is measured purely on usage, such as irrigation water consumption, number of tasks completed, hours logged or API calls made.


Suitable Business: Utilities, IoT device monitoring service, API driven SaaS platform, retail services, telecom and metered resource providers.

IdeaStrategic Advantage: Usage based addon build trust and attract customers who prefer flexible at the same time fair way of billing. They also unlock revenue that grows organically with usage.  

 What Addon Do for the Business 

Add-ons transform how a business delivers value. Instead of forcing every customer into a rigid plan structure, they allow flexible, optional and scalable extensions that match real-world needs. This means your plan remains clean and predictable, while your revenue model becomes dynamic and adaptive.

Addons in Zoho Billing not only offer different types, but also provide flexible rules for when and how addons should be attached to a subscription. You can configure,


Association Type: 

Association type controls whether the addon is optional, recommended or mandatory.

  1. Optional: The addon can be added or removed at any time when creating or editing a subscription.

  2. Recommended: The addons appear as a suggested enhancement on the hosted page.

  3. Mandatory: Addon is automatically included with the plan and cannot be removed.


Applicable Event: 

The applicable event defines the time range during which the addon should be considered.

  1. Subscription activation: Triggered when a subscription goes live.

  2. Plan Change: Triggered whenever a subscription is created or updated with a selected plan.

  3. Trial Activation: Triggered when the trial starts. 


Event Frequency 

Event frequency determines whether the addon applies once or every time the event occurs.

  1. Whenever Event Occurs: The addon is applied every time the selected event happens.

  2. First-Time Event Occurs: The addon applies only to the first occurrence of the chosen event.


With all these addons, make your subscription model future-ready, flexible, profitable and responsive to how customers actually use your service.

Customers subscribe to your plan for the essentials. But they stay and spend more when they can tailor the service to their evolving needs.

Plans create the foundation, and addons create the experience.

Together, they build a perfect subscription model that scales merrily. 


Notes
Up Next: Counting on Discounts


      • 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

        • Account validation

          Hello everyone, I registered my account on ZeptoMail to use the system, but the problem is that the verification period on Zepto's end has already passed and I have limited functionality.

        • Paste issues in ZOHO crm notes

          Hi, since a week or so I have issues with the paste function in ZOHO CRM. I use "notes" to copy paste texts from Outlook emails and since a week or so, the pasting doesnt function as it should: some text just disappears and it gives a lot of empty lines/enters.....

        • Is it possible to add a gradient color to a newsletter im designing?

          From where i sit it looks like you can only choose a single color but not combine 2 colors?

        • New Feature: Audit Log in Zoho Bookings

          Greetings from the Zoho Bookings team! We’re excited to introduce Audit Log, a new feature designed to help you track all key actions related to your appointments. With Audit Log, you can maintain transparency, strengthen security, and ensure accountability.

        • Account disabled

          I have an issue I need help with. Whilst trialing ZOHO CRM I created the following: Account1 (-------------) using m__ame@m__rg___s__i__.___.__ and 2 personal emails Account2 (-------------) using a personal email and 2 users _al__1@______________._o_.__

        • Blocked Email

          We are a Zoho One subscriber and use Yahoo as our MX provider. A few times each year, for the past four years, CRM blocks one or more of my Zoho One users from receiving internal email from CRM. This includes "@mentions" in all modules, and emails from

        • message var is empty in bot mention handler

          Hi, I'm encountering a problem: in my bot's mention handler, I want to retrieve the text the user typed when mentioning the bot. Example: On the #tests-cyril channel, I send this message: “@Donna hello how are you ?” I expect the system variable "message"

        • Remembrance Day to Remember – Recalling Values

          The phrase “at the eleventh hour” refers to the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, when the hostilities of World War I came to an end—but it still holds meaning today. Remembrance Day (Veterans Day in the US) is observed on November

        • How to display two measures (sales and price) divided by categories on one line chart

          Hi everyone, I’m having trouble figuring out how to display two columns on a line chart with category breakdowns. What I need is a line chart where one line represents Sales and the other represents Price. However, the Price data is divided into around

        • Create custom rollup summary fields in Zoho CRM

          Hello everyone, In Zoho CRM, rollup summary fields have been essential tools for summarizing data across related records and enabling users to gain quick insights without having to jump across modules. Previously, only predefined summary functions were

        • Introducing the locking option for CRM records

          Last modified on 06/04/2023: Record locking option in CRM is now available for all Zoho CRM users in all DCs. Note that it was an early access feature available only upon request. Hello All, Hope you're doing well! We're thrilled to introduce our latest

        • Two new enhancements in Zoho CRM: Introducing new criteria for user fields and displaying group information in users page

          Announcement moderated on 14th June, 2023. Dear All, These enhancements are opened for all users in all DCs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear All, Hope you're well! We are here with two useful

        • Tip #49- Navigating the Remote Support Dashboard in Zoho Assist- 'Insider Insights'

          The Remote Support dashboard in Zoho Assist is designed to help technicians quickly access, manage, and monitor all their support sessions from a single, intuitive interface. Whether you’re starting a new session, managing ongoing connections, or reviewing

        • BMI formula

          I've been trying for hours to calculate BMI using height and weight as my only inputs. It's a simple calculation and I even went to ChatGPT to help me figure this out in Zoho Forms, but it led me down a path of "try this" and "try this". None of my attempts

        • SEO on blogs

          Hello, google is not able to find my blogs. Can you advice me if I need to change some settings or anything else to make it retrievable via SEO many thanks, hans

        • Duplicated Notebooks

          Out of the blue, almost all of my notebooks got duplicated and the different copies contain different information. Some seem like older copies than the others. I use the linux desktop app and sometimes the Android app. I assume that the sync failed at some point and was unable to merge the two versions together. But I'm afraid to add anything else to my notebook because if it can't properly sync 5 notebooks with only a handful of notes each, what will happen when I have hundreds of notes and I lose

        • Mind mapping in Zoho Projects

          Good morning,   I would like to congratulate the Zoho team for building such an inovative and responsive application that fits in the daily challenges of so many work groups. I would like suggest you another functionality that helps a lot in project planning and development: mind mapping. Mind mapping would be of great help for brianstorming, knowledge management and other needs in online collaboration.   Thanks and wish you all the best! George Maha Empresa Júnior Multidisciplinar do Instituto de

        • Retainer invoice in Zoho Finance modlue

          Hello, Is there a way of creating retainer invoices in the Zoho Finance module? If not can I request this is considered for future updates please.

        • Documents don't sync properly

          Hello, My team recently moved to Zoho workDrive, some of my team, work remotely so we believed Zoho would be the best way to share and edit files as well as access files withing the team. However we are experiencing sync issues, when a file is uploaded in the file explorer and shows sync complete, same file can be seen on the Zoho web app but other team members can't see the said file because it is not syncing properly. i figured out that if i were to go to preferences in settings and resync the

        • We are looking for an experienced Zoho Developer

          Hi Everyone! We’re on the lookout for a skilled Zoho Developer with hands-on experience in the Zoho Developer Platform (The Vertical CRM Platform) and if you don't know what that is, then you are not the person we are looking for. You would also need

        • Initiate approval workflow after "on edit --> on success"

          Dear Community,  currently I am working on a initiative tracker which should handle approval workflows based on different initiative status. As far as I understand, an approval workflow can be triggered (only?) when data is entered for the input form to the database.  Example: A new initiative is created and submitted. --> Approval Workflow triggered Here comes my question: Is it also possible to trigger an approval workflow if the form was "simply" updated? (on edit --> on success) Imagine the initiative

        • Tax Deductible Donations to a Charity Organisation

          For Australia, what's the best/proper method for entering an expense that is a tax deductible donation to a charitable organisation. And thus is appears correctly in Accounts and BAS as a GST payable deduction?

        • Simultaneous use of WhatsApp Account in SalesIQ and ZohoDesk

          Hi, We have only one number registered in Meta, it's possible use same account for two apps? All times here we try is stopping in SalesIQ. Regards,

        • External lookup fields to synchronise with Analytics

          Hello. I suggest adding external lookup custom fields to the Zoho Analytics integration settings. Currently, these types of fields are not available for synchronisation, so they cannot be used to generate reports with related tables in Analytics. Thank

        • We should have an option to Toggle Off KB Article Links in AI Answer Bot Replies

          Hi everyone, I'm creating this topic to share a feature idea that I think would improve the customer experience when using the AI Answer Bot for self-service. The Current Behavior (The Problem) Currently, when the AI Answer Bot generates a summary or

        • Boot Loop After Removing Service from Client via Admin

          We have multiple laptops experiencing a boot loop / unable to login after the Zoho Remote service was removed from their machine remotely via the desktop client. The Windows sign-in screen is not available, and users are unable to login. This seems like

        • Request Backend Correction — Domains Mapped to Same Help Center (Multi-Brand Setup Failure)

          Hello Zoho Desk Support Team, I need assistance correcting a domain-to-brand mapping issue in our Zoho Desk instance (The Blue Ribbon Project). Both of our verified domains currently point to the same Help Center instead of separate brand portals. Current

        • is there any option to enable the participants interact - can write on the screen, while the screen is shared by the host?

          this is most expected features - for teaching children. is there any option to enable the participants interact - can write on the screen, while the screen is shared by the host?

        • How to disable the Login button in Desk Helpcenter

          Hey there, I'm testing out whether the help center within Zoho Desk could replace our existing Customer FAQ. I tried to customize the themes for the public help center frontend, but stumbled across the login button in the navigation bar. Is there any

        • Subforms in stateless forms

          I think the title says it all. We need to be able to add subforms to stateless forms. Currently the only workaround is to create a Form and delete each record upon submission of the form. I need to build an interface to update our inventory. Basically

        • Standard Payment Term is not pulled from account to quotation

          Hey Team There seems to be something off. I do have "Net 30" as my default payment term in Zoho Books for my customers. If, from the customer overview or quote section, I create a new Quotation, the payment terms field stays blank and doesn't get the

        • Best way to display complex Bookings Consultation Descriptions on Zoho Site?

          I am a new user so apologies if this has been asked before. I couldn't find any answers in the forum. We offer 18 complex Consultations to our subscribers. Our current platform lets me put detail on these Consultations thoroughly (200-300 words) during

        • Gmail is ramping up its email sender policy as of November 2025

          Hello marketers, As you may be aware, Gmail introduced a guideline for bulk senders starting February 2024. If not, here's a quick refresher straight from Google: After this policy was announced first in 2023 and soft-implemented in February 2024, we

        • Modifying iframe data of Zoho booking iframe

          Hello, I have integrated a Zoho Bookings embedded iframe into my website. Currently, I am pre-filling the booking form with default values as part of our process flow. However, I want to ensure that if an input field is already populated with a default

        • Zoho CRM Workflow and Function Backup Options

          Hi everyone! I have been able to make several backups of my CRM data and noticed that the Workflows and Functions are not included in these backups. To my knowledge, there is no backup feature for workflows and functions, which is problematic in of itself.

        • Enhance Sign CRM integration

          Hello all, I'm working on a custom Deluge script to enhance the integration between Zoho CRM and Sign by using a writer merge template for additional flexibility. I want to replicate the post-sign document integration that exists between CRM and Sign

        • YouTube Live streaming? how to? Zoom has this feature, built-in. Can't find it on zoho meetings.

          YouTube Live streaming? how to? Zoom has this feature, built-in. Can't find it on zoho meetings.

        • Is or will be possible to associate meeting transcription and summary, made by Zia, to meeting/contact/account record in CRM?

          Would be useful to keep context and track jobs, better if it will be auto

        • Desk Field Not Showing in Analytics

          Hi there, I recently added a field to our Zoho Desk Ticket Information. I went and added the data retrospectively to the tickets. It is also marked as required, so all new tickets cannot be closed off without it being filled in. When I try to run a report

        • Export data using advanced export options and customizable settings

          Hello everyone, The user interface for exporting data has been revamped with updates to make data exports more flexible and efficient for users. These updates not only enhance usability but also bring advanced capabilities to help users extract precise

        • Next Page