Seat-based Pricing

Overview

Seat-based SaaS pricing is arguably still the most common ways of pricing structure. It is straightforward to both buyers and sellers. Seat-based pricing usually charges upfront for the amount of seats purchased. Some examples of popular SaaS products with seat-based pricing are HubSpot, Apollo, Rippling, etc. Seat-based pricing sometimes is also called license-based, or subscription-based.

Enable Seat-based Pricing

Seat-based pricing works in the following ways:

• Billing occurs upfront for the amount of seat purchased.

• Customers can add seats during the billing cycle. An immediate charge will be made for the net new amount added. In the next billing cycle, the total new amount will be billed automatically.

• Depends on the business preference, reducing the number of seats may or may not allowed mid billing cycle.

To enable seat-based pricing, first create a product item called Seat of type Upfront Subscription , which essentially means the product items are determined and charged upfront. Then create a product plan of type Subscription-based that contains the product item Seat. All other properties of the product plan can be configured as wish, such as monthly recurring fee on top of the fees for Seat.

When a customer is enrolled in the product plan, they will be asked to provide the amount of Seat purchased. An invoice will be generated and a charge maybe attempted automatically for the total amount due.

For example, if the product item Seat is defined as $25/seat, and product plan has a $30 recurring monthly fee. When a customer is enrolled in the plan with 1 seat purchased, the customer will be invoiced and charged $55 upon enrollment. See a screenshot below for an example.

Add Seats (Mid Billing Cycle)

During billing cycles, customers may choose to add more seats to what they are already purchased. Paigo has built-in features to automatically handle subscription updates such as adding seats. The business can add seats from Paigo billing dashboard, using Paigo API, or allow customers to self-serve inside Customer Billing Portal. See below for a screenshot of adding seats from Paigo billing dashboard.