Pricing models

Pricing comes first

A billing platform can only execute the pricing model you give it. Flat and tiered are easy to run anywhere. Usage-based, credit, and hybrid need specific capabilities — metering, real-time events, entitlement tracking, proration across usage and subscriptions.

The wrong platform for your pricing model is a far more expensive mistake than the wrong pricing model on the right platform.

Flat-rate pricing

One price, full access. The simplest SaaS pricing — and the one most companies outgrow first.

When it works: a single, well-defined buyer segment with predictable value.

When it breaks: usage varies wildly between customers, heavy users subsidise light users, or you need to serve both SMB and enterprise on the same product.

Tiered pricing

Multiple plans at different price points. The default SaaS pricing model — and the hardest to get right.

When it works: feature differentiation is real and customers segment cleanly into plans.

When it breaks: tiers become feature soup, customers game the boundaries, or “enterprise” becomes a placeholder for every deal you don’t want to price.

Per-seat pricing

Charge per user. Revenue scales with adoption — but it penalises the behaviour you want most: more people using your product.

When it works: each user generates roughly equal value, and seat count correlates with willingness to pay (collaboration tools, CRM, developer seats).

When it breaks: AI products where individual users generate massively different amounts of value, or products where expansion depends on broad organisational adoption.

Usage-based pricing

Pay for what you use. The native model for APIs, infrastructure, and AI — and the hardest to implement well.

When it works: consumption is a clear proxy for value and customers are comfortable with variable bills.

When it breaks: bill-shock surprises enterprise buyers, procurement can’t approve unbounded spend, or your metering pipeline goes down and you can’t bill the month.

Needs real metering infrastructure. Supported well by Orb, Metronome, Lago, and direct Stripe integrations. MoR support is limited.

Credit pricing

Buy credits upfront, spend them on actions. Prepaid predictability meets usage-based flexibility — the abstraction has real costs.

When it works: customers want predictability and you want cash upfront; pricing is hidden behind an abstract unit you can tune.

When it breaks: customers forget how credits map to value, expiry rules cause friction, or the accounting treatment (deferred revenue, breakage) surprises finance.

Hybrid pricing

Base subscription plus usage charges. Where most mature SaaS products end up — because no single model captures value alone.

When it works: there’s a committed baseline to price the relationship and variable usage to price the value delivered.

When it breaks: invoice clarity suffers, customers can’t predict bills, or your billing system can’t reconcile subscription events with usage events cleanly.

How the choice constrains your platform

• —Flat, tiered, per-seat — supported by every major platform, including most MoRs.
• —Usage-based — needs a platform built for metering. MoRs are usually a poor fit.
• —Credit — usually a custom layer on top of a subscription platform.
• —Hybrid — requires platforms that treat subscriptions and usage as one pricing surface (Orb, Metronome, Lago, or Stripe with custom logic).

If you need clarity, use one of the entry points on the site.