Fixed ***** What is fixed pricing? ====================== Fixed pricing represents a static price every period for a product for a set quantity. From a billing perspective, the customer will be charged an amount at the beginning or end of a term which is defined up front. Products that utilize a fixed pricing scheme do not change their quantity or price unless an amendment is made. Since the quantity and price are fixed this results in a static amount. The major benefit of this approach is simplicity. The major disadvantage is the lack of flexibility. Should a customer pay full price if they don’t use the product? With subscription based pricing there isn’t much of an option. While there isn’t the flexibility to change the price there are different ways to introduce customization. For example different patterns of invoice schedules can offer some form of wiggle room. An onboarding fee is an example where it wouldn’t be necessary to repeatedly bill. Charging a fixed price at the beginning of the contract would probably be the best approach and is a generally accepted practice A more incidental variant of fixed pricing is poration. If the intention was to bill at the end of each month and the customer signed up on the 15th how does this factor into the math? Often practitioners will reduce the fixed charge to ensure the customer is only paying for the days they have been under contract. This is called proration and can occur in advanced or arrears. Usage limits ============ Some products have a cost associated with their operation. Using fixed pricing can lead to a contract being unprofitable due to heavy customer usage. One way to mitigate this problem is with usage limits. This caps the potential costs associated with the product for a given fixed price. While this can be effective at protecting the practitioner from runaway costs it comes at the price of a degraded customer experience. Any time the customer needs more usage they will have to go through an upgrade flow which can be disruptive to the business. Webflow’s pricing page is a great example of how usage caps can be used to increase the price based on usage while still using a fixed pricing methodology. In their case usage limits exist on almost every product they offer. The limits are only removed at the enterprise level were in theory they can craft pricing that makes sense for said customer’s specific use case. |image0| How do you model fixed pricing? =============================== Since the pricing is generally static the modeling is pretty straightforward. A single price model can represent a product with fixed pricing. In the Wikipedia example, the Platform fee has fixed pricing. Additionally this product will always have a quantity of one, so there is no need to think about setting the ``fixed_quantity`` column. .. csv-table:: List prices, Products, Pricebooks :file: /_static/ex_tables/ex_3_1.csv :class: bmodel-table :header-rows: 1 Pricing curve ------------- When looking at the pricing curve it's obvious that this product has a static price, amount and quantity. This is expected when modeling fixed pricing and generally can be considered a good thing. The price you see is what you get! |image1| .. |image0| image:: /_static/images/configuration/pricing/webflow_pricing.png .. |image1| image:: /_static/ex_svg/ex_3_1.svg