Advanced Usage Billing: Prepaid with Drawdown

Picture yourself at your favourite coffee shop, Bean & Brew. You come by every morning for your usual cappuccino, and occasionally you get an extra cold brew and a muffin or two in the afternoon. Interestingly, Bean & Brew has a new idea of offering a Coffee Pass. You can pay $50 in advance for 25 drinks. Each time you purchase a coffee, the system automatically deducts one drink from your prepaid balance. The goal is to have no wait time at the counter. 

Some weeks, you go there every day. You might skip a few mornings at other times. No matter what, you've already paid in full, and you're just taking money out of your balance/credit as you go.

You can immediately add money to your balance if it gets low or runs out. If you have extra drinks at the end of the month, you can even roll them over to the next month. The payment process seems straightforward and clear while giving you full control.

That's the simplest way to explain Prepaid with Drawdown.

The New Reality 

Prepaid with Drawdown is quietly gaining ground because people need it in today's world. Businesses that offer AI, machine learning, and cloud services have a unique problem as they slowly move into consumption-based billing. They can't predict how their services will be used. A customer might make a few API requests one week, and the next week, they might process millions of data points or hours of video.

Traditional monthly billing is difficult to maintain. Customers often receive bills they weren't expecting, and businesses have to wait longer for money and take on more credit risk.

That's when Prepaid with Drawdown comes into play.

Customers pay in advance for a set number of credits or usage units. The system automatically takes credits from the prepaid balance every time they use the service, whether it's transcription minutes or an API call. Customers can always see what's left, add more when they need to, and, depending on the provider's policy, roll over unused credits.

It's a model that combines predictability and flexibility. It lets customers control costs while businesses keep a steady flow of cash.

Prepaid with Drawdown in Zoho Billing 

Zoho Billing has built-in support for Prepaid with Drawdown billing, which makes it easy for businesses to switch to this new model quickly and easily. This prepaid drawdown will change the game for setting up fair and real-time cash flow if you work in AI services, SaaS, cloud computing, or any other business model that relies on consumption.

This is how it works:

• Create prepaid plan or add-on: Define prepaid products so that customers pay for usage credits in advance.

• Drawdown Addon: Link usage lets services automatically take credits out of prepaid balances.

• Real-time usage tracking: Track usage through Zoho's API or admin console and see the balance change right away.

• Manage Overage and Rollover: Set up how overage usage is billed and how unused credit can be rolled over.

• Top-Up and Overrides: Let customers add credits in the middle of a billing cycle or change the number of credits when they sign up for a subscription.

• Statement and Invoicing: Statement shows the number of credits/units consumed, and it can be invoiced instantly or with the upcoming cycle along with overage charges.

Scenario:

Let's say a cloud storage service offers a safe place for startups and content creators to store and back up their data.

The service provider offers a Prepaid Storage Plan because file uploads and downloads can vary a lot from month to month. Every customer pays in advance for a certain amount of data credits, like 5TB. Zoho Billing keeps track of how much they use every time they upload or download files and takes the same amount out of their prepaid balance.

The service provider also offers a Compression Service, where each GB of compressed data users receive 0.5 GB worth of credit.

Anna subscribes to the prepaid storage plan.

• She consumes 800 GB of data on the first day.

• Zoho Billing takes 800 GB off their prepaid balance right away, leaving them with 4200 GB.

• Anna consumes 100 GB of compressed data, which Zoho Billing seamlessly handles through a drawdown rate and reduces the credit by 50 GB.

• Again, on day 10, another 1000 GB was used, leaving Anna with a balance of 3150 GB in credit at the end of the month.

When usage tracking is connected to Zoho Billing in real time using APIs, all of this happens in real time.

Suppose, the balance credit reaches zero, Zoho Billing automatically starts tracking any extra usage as overage. This extra usage will be charged at standard rates on the next invoice or right away if the business chooses to "Charge Now." Also, The service provider rolls over the credits to the next billing cycle to make it flexible and fair. 

Note: The prepaid with Drawdown billing model is currently in early access. Reach out to support@zohobilling.com to enable it for your business. Then, go through our Prepaid with Drawdown in Zoho Billing help document to configure it in your organization.  

 Key Takeaways  

For Customers	For Business
Pay in advance to avoid surprise bills or missing payments.	Getting paid before services are used will improve cash flow.
Keep an eye on the credits you use and your remaining balance right away.	Keep unpaid bills and late payments to a minimum.
Buy more units whenever you need them to handle a spike in use.	Track how people use your service in real time to optimize service delivery.
Unused credits can be carried over when policies allow them, so there is no waste.	Overage can be tracked and monetized easily without service interruption.

 

I am confident that the next time you use your coffee pass at Bean & Brew, or any other prepaid service, you will realize it is more than just a convenience. It's a small, everyday reflection of how many big data-driven companies are changing how we pay for technology.

The Prepaid with Drawdown model has scope in every business we encounter. We will provide additional use cases in the comments to make it easier for companies to adopt this model logically. 

• 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

• Syncing calendar with Google Calendar doesn't work when events are sent to auto repeat

  Hi... The ZOHO CRM -- GOOGLE CALENDAR sync is broken. If I create a single event on either side, sync works, but if I create an event with auto repeat on either side it doesn't work. Furthermore, events created before the sync don't show up in the calendar.

• Organization wide Account and Contacts Visibility/Sharing Capabilities?

  Has anyone figured out a way to make visibility or sharing of Accounts and Contacts to be available across the entire organization without having to have every individual user edit their Sharing permissions? For our sales folks they need to be able to

• Notification of Interaction Assignment

  If a user is assigned an interaction, they should be notified via email. These are almost useless because if I assign an interaction for someone to respond to, they dont know that I assigned it to them without me telling them or them logging in and discovering

• Countries List Global Set- Complete with Phone Country Code and Continent.

  Dear Zoho Team I saw your recent addition to the Global Sets regarding the Countries list and states. While working on it, why didn't you also add things like Continent and Phone Country Code? Also, some ISO codes from some Countries/regions are mis

• Custom Display Field for Lookup Dropdowns in Zoho CRM

  Could Zoho CRM support changing the display field in lookup dropdowns, like Zoho Creator does? This would make it much easier to select the right record by showing a more useful field instead of only the default one. It would improve speed, clarity, and

• Message as bot

  I would like to be able to send a Cliq message truly as a bot. the current implementation of this function, while it sends the message as a bot it sends that message inside a chat from the user how authenticated the flow cliq connection instead of directly

• Books <-> CRM synchronisation with custom Fields

  Hello, We are synchronising Books Customers with CRM Accounts. In CRM Accounts I set up last year a "segments" multiselect field shown below In Books, I set up a custom multi-select field with the same value as in the CRM And set up the synchronisation inside Books. Want to synchronise the Books Segments with the CRM Segments, but the later doesn't exist, and another non-existing is there ?! First, I don't understand where the field Segmentation is coming from. Second, I set CRM Segmentation to sync

• Trouble with using Apostrophe in Name of Customers and Vendors

  We have had an ongoing issue with how the system recognizes an apostrophe in the name of customers and vendors. The search will not return any results for a name that includes the mark; ie one of our vendors names is "L'Heritage" and when entering the

• Recording overpayment?

  So a customer just overpaid me and how do I record this? I can't enter an amount that is higher than the invoice amount. Eg. Invoice is $195 and he sent $200. He's a reccuring customer so is there a way to record so that he has a $5 advance for future invoice?

• Introducing the New Zoho Assist Quick Support Plugin

  We are thrilled to announce the new Zoho Assist Quick Support Plugin, the upgraded and enhanced version of the Zoho Assist Customer Plugin. This new plugin allows organizations and IT administrators to deploy it directly onto their customers’ devices,

• Automate your signing workflows with Zoho Sign + n8n

  Hello! We're excited to announce that Zoho Sign is now available as a community node on n8n, a popular open-source workflow automation platform used by tens of thousands of teams worldwide. n8n lets you connect apps, APIs, and services through a visual

• Ask the Experts 27: Onboarding and managing support reps

  Hello everyone, We are back with our Ask the Experts (ATE) series for 2026. This year, we bring experts to help you address customer support challenges using Zoho Desk. For our first ATE, we are getting into the human side of customer support. "Every

• 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.

• Spotlight #27: Embed visual collaboration Spaces in your presentations using the Vani add-on

  Hello everyone! This month’s spotlight feature is the Vani add-on for Zoho Show. Every time you pause your presentation to open another tab or pull up supporting material, you lose a bit of momentum. At Zoho Show, we design features that keep everything

• CRM

  Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Our company is not moving out of using Gmail's web app. It just has more features and is a better email program than Zoho Mail. Gmail has an extension (Zoho CRM for Gmail) that we're using but we've found some serious

• Good news! Calendar in Zoho CRM gets a face lift

  Dear Customers, We are delighted to unveil the revamped calendar UI in Zoho CRM. With a complete visual overhaul aligned with CRM for Everyone, the calendar now offers a more intuitive and flexible scheduling experience. What’s new? Distinguish activities

• Global Search / Command Palette in Live App

  Zoho Creator applications can contain many forms, reports, pages, and dashboards. While navigation inside the app is smooth, users still need to move through multiple menus or screens to find specific records or open particular modules. Currently, in

• New 2026 Application Themes

  Love the new themes - shame you can't get a little more granular with the colours, ie 3 different colours so one for the dropdown menu background. Also, I did have our logo above the application name but it appears you can't change logo placement position

• Smarter appointment allocation with round-robin distribution

  Greetings from the Zoho Bookings team! We’re excited to introduce the Appointment Distribution feature, a new way to decide how appointments are assigned among users. By default, appointments are distributed evenly across all event types, but this enhancement

• A2P 10DLC Opt-in Rejection Issue with Zoho Creator Public Form

  Hi everyone, I’m working on an A2P 10DLC SMS campaign and running into repeated rejections due to opt-in issues. I’m using Zoho Creator for the registration flow. The form is public (no login required). Users enter their phone number and there is an unchecked

• Analytics & Reporting Improvements + Export Bug

  Hello, I would like to raise several important product suggestions and issues regarding Zoho Expense: 1. Filter in Admin View → Analytics → Expense Details → Receipt Is it possible to add a filter that allows us to prioritize or sort reports that have

• Make Quick Edits to Images Before Attaching

  Hello everyone, We have enhanced how attachments are handled in tickets to help agents preview and share files more efficiently in Zoho Desk. Agents can preview image attachments before adding them to tickets and edit them using attachment annotator.

• 3/18 オンライン勉強会のお知らせ Zoho ワークアウト （無料）

  ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。コミュニティチームの中野です。 3月開催のZoho ワークアウトの開催が決定しましたのでご案内します。 今回はZoomにて、オンライン開催します。 ▶︎参加登録はこちら（無料） https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/BoNTN7zYR8OvOPGShqBY0A ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 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指すイベントです。

• Extend color coding to custom picklist fields

  Objectively, Projects has the best UI of any Zoho app — clean, intuitive, and never feels bloated. Big props to whoever owns the design. Feature request: color coding for custom picklist field values in field customization. You've already done it in two

• New in Office Integrator: In-sheet text translation

  Hi users, We're pleased to introduce translation capability in the spreadsheet editor in Zoho Office Integrator. This allows you to translate the text in your spreadsheet's cells into 70+ languages from within your web app. Office Integrator's spreadsheet

• Streamline email communication with Out of Office configuration

  Managing user communication effectively is the key to ensuring timely responses and consistent messaging. However, when users are unavailable, the absence of an Out of Office response can lead to delays and missed expectations. Managing these settings

• Changing settings for auto logoff

  I've noticed that when I haven't used Cliq for a while, I have to re-enter my password. That is really clumsy, especially if you have a complicated password. Because it won't be filled in automatically. Is there a way to change that behaviour? We are

• A few Issues when using "Pay Bill via Check"

  We have quite a bit of issues with how paying for Bills via Check works. Would love some feedback from the Zoho team in case we are doing something incorrectly. 1. When we go from a vendor and select "Pay Bill via Check" option, we see ALL the outstanding

• Prevent tracking users from specific countries

  Currently, I’m receiving many bot visits from the United States and Malaysia. I would like these visits not to be recorded in SalesIQ. I already enabled the option to exclude traffic from cloud service providers, but I’m still receiving bot visits. Ideally,

• My client requires me to have custom pdf file names to except payment for invoices, how can I customize this before emailing.

  Hello! I love the program so far but there are a few things that are standing in the way. I hope you guys can code them in so I can keep the program for years to come. My client requires I customize the pdf file names I send in for billing. Can you please

• Edit Project Number?

  Hi all: We just signed up for a trial of zoho one, which includes ZoHo Projects. We've noticed there was a 'dummy project' preloaded in projects to help familiarize yourself with the software. We've created a couple of our own projects now but noticed since the dummy project was preloaded, our projects start with number 2 then 3, sequentially. Since it seems we will be keeping zoho past the trial, If we delete the dummy project, how do we get our own projects renumbered, beginning with 1? We'd like

• Download pricebook products & details - not just pricebook creation date & name

  We're looking to download a copy of a pricebook and its associated products & book prices (as we have several offices in different countries selling the same products), however, when using the export feature under Data administration it only gives me

• 554 5.1.1 – Mail sending blocked for the domain(s): [gmail.com]

  Here's your corrected text: Hello, I hope you are doing well. I was unable to send a message and received the following error: "554 5.1.1 – Mail sending blocked for the domain(s): [gmail.com]" I tried to send and deliver an email but got this error. I

• Outgoing Mail Blocked – Suspicious Login Activity (Need Clarification and Solution)

  Hello, I’m currently facing an issue where my Zoho Mail account has been blocked due to “suspicious login activity,” and outgoing emails are restricted. Here are the details shown: Block type: Outgoing mail blocked Reason: Suspicious login activity A

• Assign Meeting in records

  It would be nice to be able to "call and assing" meetings from a record, for example from a Deal. Right now - calendar is synced with CRM - meetings show in calendar - you can go in each meeting and assign it to a record It would be nice to be able to

• Allow Global Admin to access/edit all forms without changing owners

  Hi there, Please consider adding a feature where the Global Admin of the account an automatically access/edit any form in the Company Account. I'm the Global Admin on our Zoho One plan, and we have multiple users that use/create forms. But for me to access

• ERROR: "Please enter a valid Phone"

  WHAT IS THE PHONE FORMAT? There is nothing ANYWHERE to define the format. At least the error should either show the correct format or provide a link to the help file I enter a valid phone number in as many formats as I can think of and none of them allow me to save the number to CRM Nothing works! No matter what format I enter I keep getting a red error "Please enter a valid Phone" The international format for MY mobile is +61414652366 (or +61 414 652 366) Local format is 0414652366 I call all over

• Introducing Zoho Sprints 3.0

  Zoho Sprints is consistently evolving in steady increments. The introduction of the latest version, with its enterprise level solutions, brings to you advanced capabilities that propel your agile efforts in the right direction. Here's a quick glimpse

• Transaction Rules & Customer Payments

  So I have a situation as follows. We have many clients who are all invoiced on the 1st of each month on a recurring invoice for 1 of 10 plans. This means that almost all payment dates are the same (some people pay late) and that a lot of the amounts are

• Customize Sign-out Button

  Are there some url parameters I can use to make a form button sign-out the user from the app? The sign-out link on the top right is small. Here's and example of the url for the top right sign-out: https://creator.zoho.com/logoutpage.jsp?sharedBy=niskypto&appID=212085000006568003&appLinkName=MYAPP&signOutUrl=niskypto/MYAPP/view-login/SOMEPAGE Note: In my account, the sign-out is set to redirect users to my website. Can I also override this with some url parameters? John M. Whitney

• Next Page