Usage-based pricing: The ultimate guide

What is usage-based pricing?

With usage-based pricing the price a customer pays for a service is based on their consumption (or usage). So, instead of paying for how much they expect to need (an estimate of capacity) with subscriptions, they only have to pay for how much they actually use.

There are a variety of ways for UBP to be implemented depending on the type of usage, business model, and other factors. Some clearer examples range from charging based on resources consumed to the number of leads generated to the number of tasks or API calls. Other pricing models take more of a hybrid approach, layering UBP on top of their feature-based tiers or ‘seat’ fees.

Hybrid pricing: Subscription + usage

pricing models. In actual application, software pricing exists on a spectrum ranging between these two points, with most UBP adopters falling somewhere in the middle with elements of both subscription and consumption models. Businesses can move toward hybrid from both extremes:

Businesses who are moving from traditional subscription models to hybrid by adding usage-based elements to their existing subscription pricing to create a hybrid model – also called ‘Subscription 2.0’ or usage-based subscriptions. For them, the rationale is about better price discrimination, margin control and low-friction revenue expansion.

Businesses who are moving from pure UBP to hybrid. There are a number of reasonable objections to UBP; for example, a lack of predictability and cash flow challenges from invoicing in arrears. Some companies respond to these by adding subscription-like elements such as commitments with generous usage allowances (to help deliver predictability) and prepayments of those commitments (to help cash flow). This results in a “softer UBP” that is also effectively hybrid.

Usage-based pricing examples

Deploying hybrid models – As mentioned before, this is the most common application of UBP. An example of a hybrid model would be per-seat or tiered pricing with the addition of usage limits (or extra fees for high consumption). Example: HubSpot.

Linking price to resource consumption – This strategy is usually utilized lower in the stack where the product is the infrastructure resource itself (e.g., Amazon Web Services, MongoDB, Snowflake) or a service that obviously consumes a lot of resources (e.g., Datadog or Sumo Logic).

Linking price to product impact – In this strategy, the customer’s price is based on the impact the product had on their business. This can be effective as it links pricing to the customer’s success (“mutually assured success”, if you will). Examples include Paddle and Stripe pricing based on a share of revenue.

Volume discounting – Offering discounts to customers based on volume can encourage more usage, as it’s rewarding these customers with declining marginal costs of use (the opposite of diminishing returns). An example of decreasing unit pricing as volume increases: Confluence.

Trading discounts for commitments – In this strategy, companies will decrease the variable usage price in exchange for the customer committing to a specified level of spend. For example, AWS Reserved Instances, Savings Plans and the Enterprise Discount Program all trade discounts for usage commitments.

More types of usage-based pricing

If you want to go in to more depth with these examples, try our article "5 Usage-Based Pricing Examples to Improve Your Pricing Strategy".

How to implement and succeed at consumption-based pricing

Implementing and managing consumption-based pricing requires the whole business to come together – from leadership and the board to key internal teams like Finance, Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success. Maybe you’re handling this manually and struggling with a system built in-house. Or, perhaps your team is looking to launch a new SaaS product with UBP. Either way, you need the right infrastructure and systems in place with access to the right usage and commercial data.

Pricing is not a set-it-and-forget-it task or a box you can check off. This is especially true for usage-based strategies, which require businesses to make pricing an ongoing, active motion. This chapter will walk you through the full journey of UBP implementation.

Selecting the best pricing metric

According to a 2021 survey from Coatue Partners, the hardest part of deploying usage-based pricing is finding the right metric. When including elements of UBP in your pricing model, it’s crucial to attach pricing to a usage metric that aligns with how customers glean value from the service and what success looks like to them. All of this ensures spend is connected with positive business outcomes, rather than a cost item to be managed downward. You also need to make fees simple to understand and not impossible to predict. If not, how a customer's spend would scale becomes opaque, and that creates adoption friction.

To provide an example, let’s say you offer a backend-as-a-service to mobile games. If you price based on the number of players the businesses attracts, this overlaps well with their own metrics for success – it’s ‘good’ spend that is easy to understand, and forecasting is simple.

The tech stack you need to implement and manage UBP

The good news is that a majority of companies already have the tech stack needed for UBP implementation mostly in place and don’t have to make extensive changes. But UBP does require an additional component.

When you deploy UBP you need customer usage and spend data to be available throughout the business. This is a crucial enabler for multiple use cases: For billing to prepare invoices and recognize revenue in the right way, for sales agility in pricing negotiations, and more. We’ll go into more details on building out your UBP infrastructure in the next chapter: “Who is involved in making a UBP successful?"

Best practices for integrating the missing component

There are some best practices to keep in mind for integrating a new platform with existing systems. To fill the gap discussed above, you will crucially need:

• Bi-directional integrations to your existing finance and CRM systems
• An easy UI for Ops users, so they can set up and manage changes without overly relying on Engineering
• Capability to easily manage pricing in a way that matches the flexibility and complexity of your own pricing and packaging
• Alerting and events systems, to allow for automation

You can find more information in our article "5 Tips to Evaluate Usage-Based Pricing Vendors for Integrations".

Implications for operations and GTM

Since UBP’s application to B2B software is newer, it’s important to consider the implications of the pricing model for operational and Go-To-Market (GTM) capabilities. Here are four major areas affected by UBP:

Customer experience

With UBP, pricing is part of the product itself: customers need to understand their consumption and how that will translate to their spending. This requires transparency and trust, and a once-per-month invoice won’t cut it. Instead, customers will want information on demand – for example, a running total and a forecast for their monthly bill, right within the product.

Sales and Customer Success performance

Customer-facing team members need usage data for inbound billing enquiries, but also to drive revenue growth. They should be able to respond to usage signals and be proactive about encouraging further adoption, upselling or securing commitments. When these teams are more informed, they can have value-adding, higher quality conversations.

Billing operations

Accurate invoicing can be a challenge with UBP, especially if Sales often does customized pricing for a significant portion of the customer base. This is because you need to bring usage data together with pricing terms to calculate the amount that goes on a bill. Many organizations have spreadsheet-based systems for billing or clunky tools built in house, which are time-consuming, prone to errors, risky for audits, difficult to change, and not scalable. This process should be automated, which will help Finance, Sales, and Customer Success.

Reporting & KPIs

UBP has demanding requirements for reporting, oriented on the customer and their usage. Teams need to have ways to get visibility into spending, usage, costs of service, unit economics and who the outliers are (i.e. those with particularly good or bad gross margin performance). The pricing model also requires finance to track slightly different metrics, like NRR. Forecasting becomes trickier, so teams need accurate data and the right tools in place in order to accurately forecast revenue.

While these are certainly significant implications to consider, all of them come back to one core issue: Data.

All businesses with a UBP strategy need the foundational capability of data infrastructure. Having an effective way to meter usage data, apply pricing, and utilize spend data across all operations in near-real-time is crucial. Without it, UBP businesses can’t compete at the highest level and could actually hurt their relationships with customers due to inaccurate bills, exhausted finance teams, and broken customer trust.

Onfido, a provider of state-of-the-art identity verification SaaS, already had a UBP strategy in place – but their legacy platform was struggling to handle 2.5X the events it was designed for. Reconciling data to answer customer questions was also painful every time. m3ter helped Onfido prevent tens of thousands of dollars of revenue leakage each month. Want to know how?

Implications for Sales-led vs. Product-led sales channels

Businesses with both Sales-Led Growth (SLG) strategies and Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategies can adopt UBP, but there are differences in how it’s implemented and the complexity that arises.

Purely SLG businesses have one particular advantage over PLG businesses (most of which still have SLG as well) when making a switch to UBP: They have less transparent pricing on the website and can more easily run pricing experiments with different customers, even running two pricing plans simultaneously as they transition to UBP. SLG companies will often be able to offer volume usage discounts to provide incentives to grow with a single provider.

However, there is a reason why many PLG businesses choose to couple usage elements with a freemium or self-service offering: UBP is the ultimate tactic for frictionless revenue growth, as it helps customers graduate through subscription tiers or graduate to sales-led. Infrastructure providers like ClickHouse, AWS and others are good examples of this – many customers start self-serve and will want to talk to sales to get discounts as they scale. A best practice to enable this is to keep the same metric throughout channels and tiers to ensure a consistent customer experience and lower friction path.

Challenges & mitigation strategies

When implementing UBP, there are challenges commonly faced by businesses that require careful consideration. Below are some examples of these as well as mitigation strategies:

Predictability

This can be a challenge for both sides. Customers who place high value on predictability may be uncomfortable with the uncertainty of consumption-based pricing. Others may be fine with it, but could get angry if they end up with a surprise in their monthly bill due to a spike in usage or poor forecasting.

For the vendor, there can be revenue unpredictability and cash flow challenges. Because it’s dependent on variable usage, UBP has less predictable revenues than traditional pricing models. It could also create challenges for working capital, as it’s more likely to use payments in arrears rather than in advance.

Mitigation: For the customer – Deploy hybrid models to combine subscriptions with allowances and overage rates like Zapier. Consider ignoring infrequent usage spikes like Datadog. Provide the option to trade commitments for discounted variable rates to limit runaway costs, like AWS.

For the vendor – To an extent, both revenue unpredictability and cash flow challenges can be mitigated by trading commitments for discounts, but the built-in uncertainty can create obstacles for investment decisions or providing investor guidance.

Unclean data

UBP requires businesses to incorporate two types of data:

• Usage data, based in your platform; and
• Commercial data, e.g. accounts, products, plans, deals and pricing from your CRM or CPQ system.

The challenge is calculating the bill for every customer by bringing together their usage data with their pricing and having near real-time running totals that are accurate to the hour or even more frequently, rather than calculating invoices just once per month.

Mitigation: Manual UBP is a non-starter, especially as you scale. While you could try to build an involved custom solution, this is a drain on development resources and a slow, expensive and risky process. You’ll need a solution that sits between the customer, the finance stack and the platform and pricing systems, taking the heavy lifting off your Finance team and making BillingOps automated, efficient and scalable.

Sales compensation

Sales comp is one of the trickiest topics to tackle when moving toward usage-based pricing for SaaS businesses. Some of the biggest friction occurs when businesses charge by consumption but still incentivize Sales to maximize upfront committed spend.

Mitigation: This is an ongoing conversation in the industry with many points of view to consider (OpenView’s take has some great nuance.) The (unfortunately) ambiguous answer is that it’s not black and white, and every business with a current or future UBP model needs to have these conversations. (Sales comp would be a great topic for your pricing committee to work on.)

Weathering a downturn

As mentioned previously, UBP models are more susceptible to shrinking accounts than other pricing models, so although logo churn may be lower, decreased usage (and therefore revenue) can be a concern during a recession.

Mitigation: It may depend on how long the downturn is expected to last, but start by making a strategic decision about priorities during the period. If minimizing logo churn is most important, there are many ways to use UBP for this goal. If you are less worried about logos and more concerned about customers decreasing usage, a good rule of thumb is to focus on efforts to drive product adoption, keep customers happy and continue investing in the product to add value.