Billing Management: #6 Usage Billing in SaaS
Imagine a customer shuffling across multiple subscriptions, a streaming service, a music app, cloud storage, and a design tool. Each one charges a flat monthly fee, regardless of how much or how little they use. Some months, the customer barely opens the subscriptions, yet the bill is the same. This is what we call subscription fatigue, meaning resistance from the customer towards fixed, recurring charges that don't match their actual usage.
For SaaS, subscription fatigue is more than a buzzword. It's a business risk as a flat rate may appear overcharging for one, but others enjoy paying less for their high usage. This imbalance leads to churn, lost revenue and customer grievances.
The solution lies in usage billing, where the customer pays based on what they consume. By aligning cost with value, businesses can increase fairness and unlock sustainable growth. While the principle is simple, it requires a reliable way to track and monetise usage properly.
Zoho Billing Makes Usage Billing Seamless
Zoho Billing provides SaaS businesses with all the tools needed to implement usage-based pricing effectively. Key capabilities that Zoho Billing offers that work effectively for SaaS businesses include:
Flexible Pricing Tiers: Businesses can create multiple plans with different prices and list them on their websites for direct signup.
Zero value Plan: For charging customers purely based on usage alone, businesses can create $0 value plan and associate usage addons to charge appropriately.
Addons: Attach both flat-rated addons and usage-based addons to the subscription.
Hybrid Model: Combine a flat subscription fee with usage-based addons to monetise additional consumption fairly.
When a usage addon is attached to a subscription, Zoho Billing ensures that usage is tracked, recorded and billed accurately.
Scenario 1:
Sam runs a small consulting firm and uses a mailing application to communicate with his clients. His plan costs $200 and includes 500 GB of storage. Sam stays within the limit most months; however, with many attachments, proposals and reports during a particular month, his mailbox usage exceeds by another 100 GB. The mailing application provides a usage addon for $0.50/GB for the additional usage instead of offering a rigid higher value plan.
Item | Value |
Base Subscription | $200 |
Included Invoices | 500 |
Actual Usage | 600 |
Extra Usage | 100 |
Unit Price for Extra Usage | $0.50/GB |
Additional Charge | $50 |
Total Invoice Value (Base Price+Added Usage) | $250 |
The billing team records the extra 100 GB usage in Zoho Billing using the manual usage entry method and nothing more. The system automatically calculates $50 overage fee and appends it to the invoice to make the renewal invoice for the period $250.
Scenario 2:
Imagine Smith Enterprise uses a cloud analytics SaaS product. The contract covers a base subscription plan and two usage add-ons: API calls and storage. The base plan costs $500/month and includes 100,000 API calls and 500 GB storage. For every API call they make, an extra $0.01 per call will be charged. Similarly, for extra storage, $0.10 will be charged per GB.
During a particular month, the company consumes 250,000 API calls and 750 GB of storage, clearly above the usage limit. A subsequent invoice is created, and the charge based on the usage data is added to the base subscription value.
Addon 1 | Addon 2 | ||
Item | Value | Item | Value |
Included API Calls | 100,000 | Includes Storage | 500 GB |
Actual Usage | 250,000 | Actual Usage | 750 GB |
Extra Usage | 150,000 | Extra Usage | 250 |
Unit Price | $0.01/call | Unit Price | $0.10/GB |
Additional Charge | 150,000x$0.01= $1500 | Additional Charge | 250x$0.10= $25 |
Item | Charges |
Base Subscription | $500 |
API Call Overage | $1500 |
Storage Overage | $25 |
Total Invoice | $2025 |
The company exports the API call logs and storage usage data into a CSV file that can be imported into Zoho Billing. Zoho Billing digests both records, applies the pricing rule separately for each add-on, and generates a consolidated invoice.
Scenario 3:
Roy runs a digital marketing agency offering various marketing campaigns across social media platforms. Roy owns a SaaS application that generates posts and charges $1.5 per post design. No fixed base price for this, but their clients are purely charged based on the number of posts made. During festive sessions, Roy's team schedules a maximum of 450 posts for a client.
Item | Value |
Base Subscription | $0 |
Rate per post | $1.5 |
Actual Usage | 450 posts |
Total Invoice Value ($1.5x450) | $675 |
Using Zoho Billing, Roy records the usage manually or by importing them into the system. With no base price, the platform automatically calculates the total invoice based on the usage. Roy receives a clear invoice for $675, reflecting the value consumed.
SaaS Usage Billing Simplified
Usage Billing ensures that customers pay only for what they consume, whether extra storage, extra API calls, or purely based on the number of posts made. With Zoho Billing, SaaS businesses can seamlessly manage complex and straightforward usage billing scenarios. Adding usage to Zoho Billing is simplified through different methods. It can be added manually if there are fewer subscriptions, and usage data can be imported if there are more subscriptions and usage add-ons. Usage can also be pushed using APIs into Zoho Billing.
Post your use cases in the comments and find the best way to handle them using Zoho Billing.
Next, we will dive into Usage Billing in Telecom and Internet Service Providers, showing how this model powers those sectors. Topic Participants
Hari | Zoho Billing
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'sCommunity 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 youCommunity 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 mostIntroducing: 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
How to resubscribe a contact marked as "Unsubscribed (Marked by Recipient)" without using a form?
Hello, I have a question regarding Zoho Marketing Automation functionality. Is there a way for an administrator to change the subscription status of a contact marked as "Unsubscribed (Marked by Recipient)" back to "Subscribed" without using a form? Ideally,Linkedin: when Zoho Social is going serious with it?
Hi, it's been said in the past that Linkedin related features in Zoho Social were well behind those of other social networks because of limitations imposed by the platform. Now that we see around my tools (take taplio.com) frankly outpacing ZSocial on5名限定 課題解決型ワークショップイベント Zoho ワークアウト開催のお知らせ(7/24)
ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。Zoho ユーザーコミュニティチームの藤澤です。 7月開催のZoho ワークアウトについてお知らせします。 2ヶ月ぶりに、渋谷にて「リアル開催」します！ ▷▷詳細はこちら：https://www.zohomeetups.com/20250724Zoho ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Zoho ワークアウトとは？ Zoho ユーザー同士で交流しながら、サービスに関する疑問や不明点の解消を目的とした「Zoho ワークアウト」を開催します。 Zoho サービスで完了させたい設定やカスタマイズ、環境の整備など……各自で決めた目標達成に向け、How to get fields centered in a form?
Is it possible to center fields in a form? Some of my forms do some don't and it is really not aestheticly pleasing? Any help would be greatly appricated. Thanks, Michael McNeillMake Packages from multiple sales order of a single customer
Our customers sends orders to us very frequently, some times what customer wants is to ship items from 5 to 6 sales orders in a single shipment. it will be very nice if, zoho can implement this function, in which we can select items from other sales orders of the customer.Webhooks and Integration
Hey, I was looking to create automation using webhooks or something equivalent of a trigger based mechanism, to connect it as an integration. But I don't find any relevant APIs to setup these webhooks/notifcations for the "Zoho Books". Can anyone pleaseZoho Books X Zoho Expense
Hello there, Please can you tell me if it is possible to sync from Books to Expense? I much prefer the Expense reports to that of Books and the Credit Card feeds work via expense and not Books for me. However I find books is much better to deal with theABILITY TO LOG INTO CUSTOMER PORTAL
I think it would be very helpful to have a button in Zoho Books to be able to see the customer portal so we can see what they see to help them navigate through the portal. Many times, the customer will call about the portal, but without visibility intoSort, filter & save views for BOOKS PROJECTS
Thanks for all the updates. Our firm uses the module for simple internal project accountancy. This means we do everything from the Projects Section but this isn't user friendly at all. You can't do anything with customized your own fields which basicallyedit input format in custom field - sales order
hi, I want to integrate a custom field (multi line text box) in our sales order. It needs to show upper case and lower case letters, numbers, spaces, hyphens and "/". What do I need to put in the custom format to configure these signs? Thanks, TinaThis transaction type cannot be matched with a line on the statement.
When using the books API https://www.zohoapis.com/books/v3/banktransactions/uncategorized/${transaction.transaction_id}/match I get this error "This transaction type cannot be matched with a line on the statement." What I'm doing is for the uncategorizedFull Text Customization & Translation in SalesIQ Chat Widget Settings
Dear Zoho SalesIQ Team, Greetings, We would like to request an important enhancement to the chat widget customization options in Zoho SalesIQ. Current Limitation: At the moment, only some of the text shown in the chat widget is editable or translatableTimesheets
I wanted to create the timesheets remainder for our team mates who miss out the weekly timesheet entries. While creating the email templates, I couldn't see anything related to timesheets. Since it shows projects Can you help me find and build a oneCan we embed a Kanban Type of report using iframe too?
I tried embedding a report as iFrame but it only appear as List View. It would be helpful if can also embed a Kanban Type of report.Weekly Tips : Save Time with Saved Search
Let's assume your work requires you to regularly check emails from important clients that have attachments and were sent within a specific time period. Instead of entering the same conditions every time—like sender, date range, and attachments included—youBig Things Just Dropped in the SalesIQ Universe: Top Upgrades You’ll Love in Nova’25
Nova'25 has landed, and it’s packed with meaningful upgrades to help you engage smarter, work faster, and scale with ease. Whether you're into proactive messaging, smarter automation, or better admin control, there's something here for everyone. Here'sHidden Fields with Data Pre-Population and Notification Integration in Zoho Bookings Forms
Dear Zoho Bookings Support Team, We'd like to propose a feature enhancement for Zoho Bookings forms that would improve data management and workflow efficiency: the ability to create hidden fields with pre-populated data. Current Functionality: Zoho BookingsTip #37 – How to ensure compliance and accountability using Advanced Session Audit – ‘Insider Insights’
Hello Zoho Assist Community! This week we will be discussing how to strengthen your remote support operations with better visibility and control. Let’s say your support team handles a growing number of remote sessions each day. At the end of the week,Replace an existing zoho show file with an uploaded one.
For Zoho WorkDrive Upload API method, I have override-name-exist option, which I can use like this: curl https://www.zohoapis.eu/workdrive/api/v1/upload \ -F "filename=mypres.pptx" \ -F "parent_id=j3tzq1ae09c0cd91540df8d01670af05b657e" \ -F "override-name-exist=true"Tip of the Week #66– Use internal comments to collaborate and resolve issues faster!
Ever found yourself stuck on a customer query because you needed inputs from your teammate? Or sent a reply too soon and realized later that someone else on your team had a better context? When you rely on back-and-forth messages in external chats orUsing Zoho One to manage two (or more) businesses
We are one company that operates two business, a scenario that Zoho One doesn't really seem to handle very well, and one which I can't imagine is at all unique to us! (It is basically designed to facilitate branding and use for one business only per subscription).Skip order confirmation step in commerce?
We have a store to sell products that are not shipped to a customer. Right now, when the order is placed, we have to manually 'confirm' the order so the sales order can convert to an invoice and charge the customer. Is there a way to skip the manualFree Shipping Coupon - Zoho Commerce
I love the Zoho platform. Zoho Commerce is no exception; however, I'm struggling with a few common features I cannot find or are missing that I hope someone can help me with. Is there a way to create a coupon code for free shipping?Is there a way to link an item to a liability account?
I collect customer deposits for certain services and hold them in a liability account. However, Zoho Books doesn't let you create an item and assign it to a liability account so how do I create an invoice with an item that records it as a deposit intoSelect a balance sheet account when creating an invoice
Hi, it would be very helpfull to be able to select a balance sheet account when invoicing clients. We bill 30% of the job at signing and we would like to add to deferred revenues. I have to create a transit revenue account and then tranfer to the rightHow to work out commission in zoho commerce based on coupons
HI There Is there any way to produce report based on coupon name in zoho commerce We need to pay commission to various channels who are helping us to increase the online sales so we have number dedicated coupons assigned to the above mentioned channelsRequest for Subform Styling Feature in Zoho CRM Canvas
Dear Zoho CRM Team, We have observed that in the Zoho CRM Canvas view, it is currently not possible to set presets or manage the styles of subform fields. Additionally, the ability to edit subform data directly within the Canvas view appears to be limitedHow to Delete Old Tasks/Streams Assigned by Deactivated Users? 'Operation Not Permitted' Error
Hello, I’m using Zoho Mail and have several old tasks assigned to me in Tasks and Streams. These tasks were created by former employees whose accounts are now deactivated. When I try to delete these tasks, I get an "Operation Not Permitted" error. TheseZoho Books - Sales Person Contact Details on Quotes
Hi Zoho Books Team, I've had various clients ask me about showing the phone number and email of the sales person on Quotes to help eliminate any barriers to closing sales. When I tell them that it is not possible they are always surprised and say somethingRelated products category instead recommended products.
Hi there, It is possible to show related products of the same category (as it works in the rest of the ecommerce) instead of showing recommended products.Uploading PDF files
How do I upload a PDF file to my ZOHO site?How to send invoices to 2 emails?
Hi! We are sending invoices to the "Customer email" field that is defined Zoho Books and is obtained/synced from a custom email field in Zoho CRM. But in some clientes, the invoices have to be sent to 2 emails and we are wondering how this could be accomplished.It returns 1 record
Var1= Tools_Request[Liability_Receipt == input.Liability_No]; for each rec in Var1.Tool_Request_Description { Var2= (ET_Inventory[SKU == rec.Tools_SKU].SKU).getAll(); } info call for Var2 It only fetch 1 record On record fileNarrative 5: The essential role of SLAs
Behind the scenes of a successful ticketing system - BTS Series Narrative 5: The essential role of SLAs Every organization that interacts with customers establishes a timeframe within which agents should respond to queries as part of a service level agreementNextdoor Integration
Does Zoho social work with Nextdoor? www.nextdoor.com? Are there any plans for an integration?My email sending has beed blocked due to high bounce rate. NEED HELP
User ID: 886739811 Dear Zoho Team, I hope this message finds you well. My account (User ID: 886739811) was blocked from sending emails last week due to an unusually high bounce rate. This spike was caused by a bot attack on our platform, which led toCan Zoho CRM Emails be used in Zoho Analytics in any capacity?
We're wanting to display details about Lead Activity in regular reports through Zoho Analytics but we're having difficulty integrating Emails at all. We'd like to be able to note when an email is received and when it is sent somewhere other than justIF Statement in Zoho CRM Formula Field
Hi, I am attempting to write a formula field that will give me one result if one statement AND another statement are true, then a different value if the first statement AND a different statement are true, else 0. Stated differently: if account = destinationScheduled Maintenances
Hi, Why is adding scheduled maintenance so arduous. It should be a simple process and take very little time for basically a recurring job. Creating 3 records with similar data seems crazy to me. Is there a easy way to do this? I have to create hundredsSubform Fields for Form Rules & Subform Fields as a Condition with Form Fields as the Action
Hi, The Subform in Field Rules is great, but it is missing completley from Form Rules and it lacks being able to have Subform Fields in the Condition while having Form Fields in the Action, it works the other way around. Thanks DanNext Page