Billing Management: #5 Usage Billing

Billing Management: #5 Usage Billing

After understanding the nuances of Advance Billing and Retainers, we will explore one of the booming billing models.

Long ago, villagers drew water from a shared well in a small village. The well was a lifeline for the entire community. Ravi, the well keeper, spent his days making sure the water stayed clean, the walls stayed strong, and the rope was firm.

At first, he allowed everyone to take water freely. But Ravi soon realized that maintaining the well required effort; if no one contributed, the well would eventually fall into disrepair.

So he gathered the villagers and proposed something simple,

 "You don't have to pay me a fixed amount every month. Instead, pay me for the water you take."

The rule remained simple and fair. Families that took one or two pots paid less, and large households paid more. No one was overcharged, and Ravi always had enough to keep the well in good condition.

Ravi invented the earliest form of usage billing without even knowing it. It is a model built not on flat fees but on fairness: pay for what you consume, nothing more, nothing less.

 What is Usage Billing? 

Usage billing is a billing model in which customers are charged based on how much of a product or service they actually use. Unlike traditional flat subscriptions, which apply the same fee regardless of consumption, usage billing creates a direct link between value received and price paid. For customers, it ensures fairness, and for businesses, it unlocks scalable revenue growth.

As stated above, usage billing is not new. Utilities, telecom providers, SaaS companies, IoT, and several others highly rely on it. In recent times, however, it has become a strategic move by industries that thrive on flexibility.

Why Businesses Adopt Usage Billing? 

Usage-based pricing nowadays is considered a growth driver. Recent reports highlight,
  • 85% of SaaS companies have adopted some form of usage-based pricing, according to the State of Usage-Based Pricing 2025 Report by Metronome & Greyhound Capital.

  • 63% already practice it,, and 74% expect to expand usage billing further, notes as study by Chargebee in collaboration with OpenView.

  • Hybrid pricing models, where a flat subscription fee is combined with usage-based elements, are booming, with nearly half of the SaaS firms adopting them, according to the 2025 SaaS Pricing Trend Report from Maxio.

  • The same Maxio report adds that companies using usage-based pricing often report faster revenue growth (median 21%+) and stronger net dollar retention compared to peers.

 Simplifying the Complex 

Conceptually, usage billing is simple. But executing it well requires precision. Two main challenges in usage-based billing are:
  • Tracking consumption with accuracy.

  • Turning usage into an invoice transparently.

Zoho Billing provides both. It enables businesses to combine flat-rate subscriptions with usage-based billing, supporting hybrid pricing models that suit modern industries.

A subscription in Zoho Billing can be marked as a usage subscription just by a simple checkbox. Renewal invoices will include all the usage that is added and invoiced during the next billing period to ensure accurate billing. Zoho Billing supports multiple ways to record usage. Users can manually record usage individually by accessing the application. It can be uploaded in bulk using import options, and the most popular way is through APIs to push usage data automatically from your system to Zoho Billing.

Wisdom to Strategy
 
Paying only for what you use has made customers feel valued for ages. By charging based on consumption, businesses ensure sustainability and growth. From ancient water pots to today's gigabytes, transactions, and compute cycles, the principle hasn't changed, just that the scale and sophistication have changed. And with solutions like Zoho Billing, companies can turn this age-old wisdom into a modern growth strategy.

Alright, this is just a beginning. In the coming posts, we'll dive deep into how usage billing plays out across industries from SaaS to telecom to IoT, showing how businesses can apply it to stay competitive and loyal. 
    • 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

    Nederlandse Hulpbronnen


      • Recent Topics

      • Playground: An exclusive test environment to analyze Field Prediction accuracy

        Hello everyone, We are introducing Playground: an exclusive proactive testing environment for businesses to analyze Zia's prediction accuracy. This allows admins and agents to: Run predictions on actual tickets or specific content for realistic test conditions.
      • Attention: Upcoming changes to Zoho Assist support for older windows versions

        At Zoho Assist, our goal is to provide you with secure, reliable, and feature-rich remote support experiences. To maintain this standard, we periodically align our platform with the latest technology and security updates from the broader software ecosystem.
      • Send again email with link for signup

        Hello, I have a lot of problem to send contract my email, also missing the features "share link". How can I send again email to client and me wit link for signup a contract? Everytime it's a disaster!
      • How do I synchronize a quote to an opportunity?

        Hi everyone, We don't quote anything via Zoho but we use it to track services/products so that I can see what was actually sold, vs an opportunity with just shows an amount.  We use the quotes for other purposes, mostly to request a quote from Salesforce but we don't invoice or do sales orders or anything. (Basically a user makes a quick quote in Zoho, adds items and pricing, and then exports to PDF which gets emailed to our Quote Desk who then enters the request into Salesforce). Just wondering
      • Zoho Sprints Android app update: Tags and Epic search

        Hello everyone! We are excited to introduce tags and an option to search items within Epic module on the latest Android version(v2.0.2) of the Zoho Sprints mobile app. Let's take a look at these features: Tags You can now create, edit, and delete tags,
      • Zoho CRM Webhooks - Dynamic URL

        Hi Zoho, We've noted a gap in the webhooks function that if improved would increase use cases significantly. The "URL to Notify" field in "Create a Webhook" only supports static information. We have a number of use cases where we could use webhooks more
      • Work Order Creation Issue

        Dear Team, I would like to inquire about the daily limit for Work Order creation in Zoho FSM. Yesterday (02/05/2025) at around 6:30 PM GST, I attempted to create a Work Order, but I have been unable to do so since then. Please find the attached image
      • Tracking on Zoho Booking

        Hi We want to use Zoho Booking for our appointment management. We're using Calendly as of now that lets us track sources of the appointments made including UTM parameters. Is there a way for us to do same with Zoho Bookings?
      • Pre-created Popular Zoho Flows returns with 404 Error

        Your popular Zoho Flows are returning with a 404 page error. This applies to all work flows in your Gallery Space. See video here for further clarification. When will this be fixed? https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kDl4ni5EQeLHWeaoIDdtRqoUbW8FNLfO?usp=sharing
      • CRM Feature Request

        When enabling Translation in Zoho CRM I would like to see the ability to remove the language "English (US)". I have encountered a user experience issue with a client recently. The client uses English (UK) but they are based in Spain, so they have activated
      • Import your Google Docs Spreadsheets into Zoho Sheet

        You can now import your Google spreadsheet into Zoho Sheet. This will be useful if you want to switch to Zoho Sheet or if you want to simply try out Zoho Sheet.  If you don't have an account with Zoho, you can still try this by signing in with your Google account. Here is a video on how to do this.  Note: Existing charts won't appear in spreadsheets you import from Google Docs as the Export functionality of Google Docs doesn't give out the charts. Check out the announcement in our blog: https://blogs.zoho.com/general/import-google-docs-into-zoho-productivity-suite
      • Support Mixed Visibility Settings in Knowledge Base Categories

        Hello Zoho Desk Team, We hope you're all doing well. We’d like to submit a feature request regarding visibility settings in the Knowledge Base module. 🎯 Current Limitation As of today, when a category is set to a specific visibility level (e.g., Public),
      • Will a campaign send duplicates is same email is on two separate lists

        Hi I have two lists to which I want to send campaign. One list is ALL leads and other is list of opportunities and current students. There is overlap between the two lists My question is if I send one campaign to all, will zoho automatically know only to send the email once to the duplicate email?
      • Time Based Report / Dashboard

        We measure our support agent's KPI based on their response time and resolution time from the time the ticket is assigned to them The time based dashboard should provide this information however there is a problem with us referring to this dashboard We
      • Zoho Learn API Access?

        We love using Zoho Learn to manage our internal trainings and knowledge base. What we'd really love is to be able to query Learn via API so that in Zoho Projects, Zoho Creator, or Zoho Desk, we can recommend relevant Learn articles and manuals to team
      • creating buttons in zoho site

        the connection between zoho site and zoho learn will be awesome and amazing feature so the user instead of registering himself twice just one time register on zoho site will be enough and creating accout on zoho learn instead of registering on zoho learn
      • Two Problems with the Description Field

        Our ticket workflow is often like this. Client calls or emails (to a personal email address) reporting a problem. We create a ticket and enter a description. Problems: 1. By my way of thinking when we enter a description, that is an internal comment (unless we mark it public). Yet it seems there is no way to mark it internal, and Desk just starts inserting it into communications. 2. Additionally, in the conversation view it makes it appear it was emailed by the customer and inserts their name on
      • Lookup Field limitations

        Good day all, Is anyone else frustrated with the lookup field limitation? I have an enterprise license, but I only get 10 lookups. Additionally, the custom module has been available for a while and is still in diapers. If you want good reporting, you
      • Automation#36: Auto-create time-entry after performing the Blueprint transition

        Hello Everyone, This week’s edition focuses on configuring a custom function within Zoho Desk to streamline time tracking within the Blueprint. In this case, we create a custom field, and request the agent to enter the spending time within the single
      • Dynamically Sync zoho.adminuserid with Current App Admin

        Hello Zoho Team, We hope you're doing well. We’d like to request an important enhancement to the Deluge sendmail task functionality. As per the current behavior, in most Zoho services (excluding Zoho Cliq, Zoho Connect, Zoho Mail, and Zoho Sheet), the
      • "Improper Statement" Error on Deluge Loops (while/for) when Processing a Date Range

        Hello, Zoho Community, I'm facing a very specific issue with a Deluge script and would appreciate any insights from the community. The Goal: I have a form (ausencia_visitadoras) where a user inputs a start date and an end date for a period of absence.
      • Zoho Meeting iOS app update: Hearing aid, bluetooth car audio and AirPlay audio support.

        Hello everyone! We are excited to announce the below new features in the latest iOS update(v1.7.4) of the Zoho Meeting app: 1. Hearing aid support: Hearing aid support has been integrated into the application. 2. Bluetooth car Audio, AirPlay audio support:
      • Automating Daily Lottery Result Publishing with Zoho Creator or Flow – Any Best Practices?

        Hello Zoho Community, I run a results-based informational website in Brazil called CaminhoDaSorte.com, where we publish daily Jogo do Bicho results. Right now, we're doing this process manually every day — but we’re looking to automate the backend using
      • issues with manually shipping sales orders - advise needed please

        we are new to zoho inventory. we are going to roll the program out to our company within a couple of weeks and during the implementation process we have come into a roadblock with manually packaging and shipping sales orders. its important to note important
      • I do not see the “Lead Forms” option under Integrations

        Hi, I’m using Zoho Social on a Premium plan. I’ve connected LinkedIn Company Page and have a valid LinkedIn Ad Account with Lead Gen Forms. However, I do not see the “Lead Forms” option under Integrations, so I can’t enable LinkedIn Lead Generation. Please
      • STOCK function showing #N/A! even thought the Stock symbol is valid

        Zoho Team, I use STOCK function on Zoho Sheet to fetch the recent Last Closing Price. Some stock symbols are valid but when the STOCK function is applied, it shows #N/A! Attaching an image for reference.
      • What’s the Correct Integration Flow Between Zoho Inventory, ShipStation, and Multi-Channel Sales Platforms?

        Hi Zoho Community, I’m currently implementing Zoho One to manage all of my business processes, and I’d appreciate some guidance on the correct integration flow for the tools I’m using. Here’s my current setup: Zoho Inventory is my central system for managing
      • Beyond Email: #4 Note taking done right with Notes

        With her favorite links now saved in Bookmarks, Sarah is feeling even more at home in Zoho Mail. As her day fills up with meetings and project discussions, she often finds herself scribbling quick ideas and reminders—only to lose track of them later.
      • When will Sales Order and Invoice Synchronisation with Zoho CRM be Available?

        When will Sales Orders and Invoices, created in Zoho Books or Inventory be made available in Zoho CRM? John Legg Owner: The Debug Store
      • Generate Unique Customer ID for Each for All Contacts

        Generate Unique Customer ID for Each for All Contacts
      • Bookings to Books automation using Flow

        I'm using Zoho Flow to automate a process between Bookings and Books. When someone uses Bookings to schedule time with me I use Flow to automatically add the person as a customer in books, then create a Quote in Books for the type of consultation they
      • Different Canvas for Different account type

        I would like to have a separate canvas for Customers and Resellers that auto-applies when I enter an ACCOUNT. Is this do-able?
      • IMAP sync issues in Zoho CRM

        We are using the Zoho CRM for a while, and we sync (via IMAP) our Google Apps email system. The sync works properly when looking at emails per account, contact or deal, etc. However, it does not function well in the "Messages" and "SalesSigns" features.
      • Reporting tags for custom modules

        Hi, it could be very useful. At field level and at sub table level. Thanks, Eduardo
      • Can't pass Dates and use date filtered Charts in Pages?

        I don't mess with pages very much, but I'm trying to build a dashboard. I have a search element and several charts that need to be filtered. I also have a stateless form for a start/end date picker I am trying to use to filter data for the charts. Here
      • ZOHO FSM Trial - Assets

        Hi I am currently using Zoho CRM and looking at adding FSM. I am trialing FSM at the moment, to potentially move away from my current programme (SimPro) but have a query on the Asset system within FSM It looks like you can only create 1 asset "type";
      • Customize User Invites with Invitation Templates

        Invitation Templates help streamline the invitation process by allowing users to create customized email formats instead of sending a one-size-fits-all email. Different invitation templates can be created for portal users and client users to align with
      • Sending Email with Attachment (PDF, Excel file)

        Hi, I'm new to Zoho CRM and I'm setting up a flow to send an Email with Attachment when user reaching a certain stage of a Deal. In detail, I've created a Blueprint which requires user to attach a PDF file when reaching a certain point of the stage and
      • Based on the Assign To time task want to trigger also reminder for the task still move form fresh lead

        If the leads is assigned To 1 am to 10.55 am task want to create 11am Then reminder want to go the person at 4pm If lead status not moved from fresh lead. From next on wards Reminder want to go 11 Am and 4pm Every day still the person moved to fresh lead
      • Emails Not Sending

        This has happened before. I contacted Zoho and it seemed to work, but now my emails are not sending or taking a long time to send and half the time attachments don't attach. It just keeps saying Sending... and I have to keep clicking it to make it send.
      • Next Page