Plans, pricing models & subscription lifecycle
How this is scored
How the product models what is sold and to whom: plans, add-ons and price points, trials, upgrades and downgrades with proration, usage-based and seat-based pricing, contract terms and renewals, quotes, and a self-service portal where the customer changes or cancels their own subscription.
0 — No subscription model; recurring charges are set up by hand per customer or per invoice.
3 — A recurring invoice or a fixed plan that repeats on a schedule, but no proration, no trials, no add-ons and no usage component.
5 — Plans with add-ons and trials, upgrades and downgrades with proration, renewals and cancellations handled by the system, and a customer portal for viewing and changing the subscription.
8 — Usage-based, tiered, volume and seat-based pricing with metering through an API, contracts with minimum terms, ramps and notice periods, quotes that convert into subscriptions, multiple currencies and price books, and the subscription history kept per customer.
10 — The commercial model lives in the product: hybrid pricing (commitments, prepaid credits, overage) without custom code, price changes rolled out to existing customers with grandfathering, entitlements exposed to the selling application, and every change to a subscription versioned and attributed.
The Service-Business Owner
Subscriptions and recurring billing, usage-based and hybrid pricing, CPQ quotes with e-signature and multi-currency billing are all named, and a hosted portal lets billed clients see their invoices and billing details. We found no public information on trials, proration on upgrades and downgrades, seat-based pricing, or how price changes and grandfathering are handled for existing contracts — the very handling my two hundred maintenance contracts would depend on. That puts it beyond plain recurring invoicing but well short of a full commercial model. 2 5