Pricing

Overview

Products are what you sell. Each product has one or more prices that set how much customers pay, how often, and which benefits apply. Plans bundle several products together—each with a chosen price—so you can sell a composed package (for example base subscription plus add-ons) as a single unit in subscriptions and checkout.

Configure everything under Catalog in the dashboard, or through the Products, Prices, and Plans APIs.

Products

A product is anything you sell as a catalog line item—physical or digital. Examples: a shipped hardware kit, a training course download, a “Growth” plan tier, extra storage as an add-on, seats billed per user, or metered API access.

Products do not hold amounts or billing intervals by themselves, prices attached to the product hold those details, so the same product can be offered one-time, monthly or annually, in different currencies, with different usage rules or benefits without duplicating the catalog entry.

Prices

Each product can have one or more prices. Whether a price is recurring or one-time (and how it is metered) determines how the product can be sold: recurring prices are what subscriptions bill over time, so customers subscribe to a specific recurring price. One-time prices are for single purchases—one-off checkout, or manual invoices. A product might expose only recurring prices, only one-time prices, or both, depending on how you want it sold.

A price defines:

• How much is charged (and in which currency)
• How often billing runs for, one-time or recurring (for example monthly or annual)
• Whether the charge is fixed, usage-based
• Benefits (optional) — Access and usage limits so customers who buy it get the right entitlements (feature access, quotas, and similar).

Customers subscribe or purchase against a specific price, not the product alone. That is what locks in the billing period, currency, pricing model and entitlements for that subscription line. You can add multiple active prices to the same product to support regional pricing, introductory versus standard rates, or annual versus monthly options.

Usage-based prices are tied to meters so aggregated usage becomes billable amounts each period (or on each event when you enable bill-on-event). See Usage billing for meters, events, and aggregation.

The product groups what you sell; the price carries how it is billed and which benefits apply when the product is purchased or subscribed to at that price.

Price models

Billingrails supports several pricing models on a price. The model determines how the unit amount, tiers, or percentages are interpreted when generating charges and invoice lines.

• Flat — A fixed amount at each billing interval (for example $20 per month), independent of quantity.
• Per-unit — A fixed amount per unit of quantity (for example $5 per user). Quantity usually comes from the subscription line or usage.
• Package — A fixed price for a bundle of units (for example $50 per 100 API calls). Partial packages are typically billed according to how you configure rounding and tiers.
• Volume — Tiered unit pricing by total volume in the period: once usage crosses a threshold, the entire quantity is priced at that tier’s rate (for example 1–100 units at $10 each, 101–500 at $8 each).
• Graduated — Incremental tiers: the first block of units is priced at one rate, the next block at another, and so on (for example the first 100 units at $10 each, the next 100 at $8 each).
• Percentage — A charge computed as a percentage of a basis amount (for example 10% of spend or of a transaction total), useful for revenue share or platform fees.

The same product can expose prices that use different models (for example a flat platform fee plus a graduated usage price) as separate price records.

Plans

Plans bundle multiple products (each with a chosen price) into a single sellable package. They are the recommended way to model composite offers: for example a “Pro” plan might include a base subscription product, a seats add-on, and an SMS product, each with its own price and billing behavior. These prices can also have varying billing intervals.

Subscriptions can reference a plan so every included product line is created together with consistent defaults. You can still add products directly to a subscription when you need one-off composition, but plans keep repeated bundles versioned and easier to sell through payment links.

Create and manage plans in the dashboard or with the Plans API.