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.

Strategic 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.

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.

Strategic 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. 

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.

Strategic 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.

Strategic 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. 

Up Next: Counting on Discounts

• 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

• Item with name in different languate

  Hello, is there a way to have an item with its name in different languages? For example: I sell an item in different markets and I'd like to have a Proposal and the Invoice with the Item Name in a specific language. Rino Bertolotto Zoho Specialist, STESA srl

• Email notification for followers

  Is there a way to enable email notification for followers of a support ticket? ie: Ticket #123 is owned by Agent#1, Agent#2 adds themselves as a follower. Whenever ticket #123 receives an email from the customer, Agent#1 receives an email. Agent#2 would

• Migration of emails from Yandex to Zoho

  I am trying to migrate an yandex mail account to zoho mail account. I am confused with all the related articles/informations in the net. Could someone please outline the process to do it, just thinking about me as a novice with limited knowledge or experience. A couple of questions from the knowledge gained. 1. I believe we have to delete the yandex current MX from the website records and add Zoho MX. What happens to the emails as we remove the mail exchange record. Yandex stops updating emails and

• Auto-fill from logged-in user's profile for Name Fields in Subforms

  Hi, The Name field is great, but I see you can't tick the Initial Value option of "Auto-fill from logged-in user's profile" when it is on a Subform, why not? Thanks Dan

• Calling a function within another function

  Hello there, I have just found out that you can simply call up functions in other functions, regardless of the department. You can't create functions with the same name twice, even though you are in a different department. If you try it, you don't get

• 【続々公開】Zoholics Japan 2026 セッション情報を更新しました！

  ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは！ Zoholics Japan 2026のセッション情報を続々と公開しています！ 今年は3つのトラックで、Zohoの最新情報やAI活用、製品アップデート、 活用事例など、多彩なセッションをお届けします。 現在公開中のセッション（一部） ・Zoho CRM 製品アップデート ・Zoho CRM Plus 製品アップデート ・Zoho Community セッション ・Zoho Desk セッション ・中堅・成長企業の人事DX ～AI時代に何から始めるべきか？～ ・Zoho

• Zoho CRM Community Digest - July 2026 | Part 1

  Hello everyone, July is here! The first two weeks brought six CRM updates ranging from privacy-ready webforms to a significantly more powerful Layout Rules engine, two community wins worth a look (a dashboard workaround for spotting leads with no activities,

• New Ways to Personalize, Organize, and Share Your Notes

  We're excited to introduce a new set of enhancements in Zoho Notebook that make your note-taking experience cleaner, more flexible, and easier to share. With this update, you can create notes that automatically adapt to your device theme, browse your

• Zoho Commerce B2B

  Hello, I have signed up for a Zoho Commerce B2B product demo but it's not clear to me how the B2B experience would look for my customers, in a couple of ways. 1) Some of my customers are on terms and some pay upfront with credit card. How do I hide/show

• Introducing spam detection for webforms: An additional layer of protection to keep your Zoho CRM clean and secure

  Greetings all, One of the most highly anticipated feature launches—Spam Detection in webforms—has finally arrived! Webforms are a vital tool for record generation, but they're also vulnerable to submissions from unauthenticated or malicious sources, which

• Rich-text fields in Zoho CRM

  Moderation Update: During the initial release of Rich Text fields, it was supported only in the Enterprise and Ultimate editions. We have gradually extended Rich Text fields to all the paid editions of Zoho CRM. Hello everyone, We're thrilled to announce

• Add Large Lists to Choice-Based Field Rules

  Hi, The new Large List is good, but you can't then use the Choice-Based Field Rules with it to limit the Group Choices or Choices? Thanks Dan

• Email-Data Synchronization with Zoho Analytics

  Hello, Enterprise Support Community! We're excited to announce the availability of Email Data Synchronization with Zoho Analytics! This highly requested enhancement allows you to sync email data from Zoho CRM into Zoho Analytics, making it easier to analyze

• Zoho - shopify sales order - invoicing

  we have integrated zoho with shopify. so now , when an order comes through shopify-it raises a sales order in zoho. And at this time- the inventory goes down in shopify, according to the sale. Then we manually convert the sales order to an invoice, and

• Enable Replenishments Option not Available

  I'm looking to turn on the replenishment option in Zoho Inventory and I'm not finding settings for it in Zoho Books or Zoho Inventory. This is the tutorial I was following from Zoho. Is there a step I'm missing to have Replenishments be available in Zoho

• Kiosk Page Refresh

  We have a Kiosk running from a button in contacts to update values and also add related lists, which works great, but when the kiosk is finished the page does not refresh to show the changes. Is there a way to force the contact to refresh/update when

• [Solution] Analyze, Act and Automate with Drill Actions

  Insights create value only when they lead to action. Traditional dashboards excel at helping you understand what is happening, but acting on those insights often requires manual intervention leaving the dashboard, opening another application, finding

• Building extensions #6: Handling modal boxes to enhance user experience

  In our previous post, we explored creating custom graphical user interfaces using widgets. In this post, we'll learn about enhancing user experience through modal boxes. What is a modal box, and where is it used? A modal box is essentially a widget interface

• Improve User Onboarding in Zoho Projects with Zoho DAP

  Rolling out new processes or onboarding new users in the tool comes with a familiar challenge: the employees need guidance at the moment they are doing the work. Traditional training sessions and knowledge sharing often require users to leave the application.

• Zoho Social API for generating draft posts from a third-party app ?

  Hello everyone, I hope you are all well. I have a question regarding Zoho Social. I am developing an application that generates social media posts, and I would like to be able to incorporate a feature that allows saving these posts as drafts in Zoho Social.

• Your CRO data is now on your AI Assistant: PageSense is live on Zoho MCP

  Hello Everyone, We are excited to announce Zoho PageSense is now live on Zoho MCP servers. Here is what that means for you. Every answer about your website lives behind tons of data across different modules. Which test is winning. Where visitors bail.

• Feature Enhancement Request – Bulk Download of Signed Documents in Zoho Sign

  Hi Team, We would like to request a Bulk Download feature for signed documents in Zoho Sign. Currently, Zoho Sign allows users to send documents in bulk using an Excel sheet, but there is no option to download the completed signed documents in bulk. Users

• delete a user on Zoho Desk

  Kindly I Need help to delete a user on Zoho Desk but I deactivated but not deactivated with licenses so what can I Do?

• Unable to open Attendance Regularization request, reason?

  Unable to open Attendance Regularization request.

• What's New in Zoho Inventory | June 2026

  Hello users, June 2026 introduces a range of exciting enhancements to Zoho Inventory. With the full rollout of the Zoho Inventory Windows application, the launch of Terminal Payments, and new tracking combinations in Advanced Inventory Tracking, you can

• Tax/Vat Number Field As Standard - Customer & Vendor

  Hello, when are you'll going to have the customer & vendor tax/vat number as a standard field under the relevant profile pages? I find it strange that after 6 years of using Zoho Inventory that I still have to use a custom field for a tax/vat number,

• Zoho CRM - Feature Request - Conditional Lead Conversion

  Hi CRM team, My feature request is to allow admins to create some conversion logic in the Lead Conversion settings. It is a common case where we want to convert a Lead to a Commercial or Residential Deal layout. Layout rules are not ideal because the

• Zoho CRM Approval Process based on Field Update

  Hello, In current structure, Zoho CRM send records to approval based on record creation and edit.  I think, it should be to set approval process trigger based on any field update in record. When the user update any field, the record can assign to approval

• Free webinar: Automate signature workflows with Zoho Sign and Zoho WorkDrive

  Hi there! Are you still storing and managing physical paperwork before and after signing? This traditional method is bulky, costly, and impractical at scale. Attend our free webinar to learn how you can connect Zoho Sign, our digital signature app, with

• Global Sets for Multi-Select pick lists

  When is this feature coming to Zoho CRM? It would be very useful now we have got used to having it for the normal pick lists.

• Introducing the Zoho Projects Learning Space

  Every product has its learning curve, and sometimes having a guided path makes the learning experience smoother. With that goal, we introduce a dedicated learning space for Zoho Projects, a platform where you can explore lessons, learn at your own pace,

• Leave request problem on mobile phones

  Hello, When any employee attempts to submit a leave request on an Android or iOS phone, the error shown in the attachment appears. How can we solve this problem?

• [Webinar] Digitizing forms and form-based workflows

  Live webinar on August 13, 2026 | Time: 2 PM IST | 2 PM EDT Hi, Struggling with paper forms, manual data entry, disconnected approvals, and form data that never reaches the apps that need it? Join our live webinar to learn how Zoho Writer's fillable templates

• Multi-currency and Products

  One of the main reasons I have gone down the Zoho route is because I need multi-currency support. However, I find that products can only be priced in the home currency, We sell to the US and UK. However, we maintain different price lists for each. There

• Price Book in foreign currency

  We have many customers who buy in foreign currency (USD), where our base currency is our local currency (AUD). It would be normal (it is in Zoho Books, Zoho Inventory etc.) to assign a currency to a price book, but I cannot find this option in Zoho CRM

• Assign Price Book to Accounts (again!)

  I can see this topic has been bumping about for over 10 years and unfortunately Zoho hasn't seen the need (or use case) in CRM to be able to assign an account to a price book to automate quoting (amongst other things). Strange given they DO assign price

• Remove "Subject" as a required field on quotations

  Not sure why, but Zoho has made 'Subject' a system defined required field. I'm not entirely sure why subject would be required as a key field (i.e. you cannot deactivate it or change it from required). It doesn't make much sense on many product quotations,

• Approve records efficiently: Useful enhancements to My Jobs module and Approval process in Zoho CRM

  Dear Customers, As you might know, approval process is a process automation tool that allows you to automate approvals in your organization and My Jobs is where you approve requests from a single point of view. Here's how you'd go about it: You’d add

• Text/SMS With Zoho Desk

  Hi Guys- Considering using SMS to get faster responses from customers that we are helping.  Have a bunch of questions; 1) Which provider is better ClickaTell or Screen Magic.  Screen Magic seems easier to setup, but appears to be 2x as expensive for United States.  I cannot find the sender id for Clickatell to even complete the configuration. 2) Can customer's reply to text messages?  If so are responses linked back to the zoho ticket?  If not, how are you handling this, a simple "DO NOT REPLY" as

• Need complete Zoho Commerce theme ZIP example and safe staging workflow

  I want to build a complete custom Zoho Commerce storefront through Edit Code, including: • Global header and footer • Responsive homepage • Category, search and filter pages • Product cards and product-detail pages • Cart and checkout wrapper • Mobile

• Next Page