Pillar 1 - Pricing Model Definition

The Pricing Model is an append-only collection of immutable plan definitions. New plan versions may be added at any time. However, once published for use, a plan cannot be modified.

Plans within the pricing model indicate the prices and tiers of all application features enabled for subscribed customers.

The pricing model may be canonically stored in a payment processor's system, a database, or some other sort of configuration, but there is one representation which is the authoritative single source of truth which can enforce immutability guarantees.

Furthermore, the Pricing Model expresses all variations of pricing plans. If a single customer is granted a unique pricing scheme or discount, then this is reflected in the pricing model as a custom (immutable) plan.

It is not important for any specific plan to be ideal. New plans can be added and tested at any time.

Values Provided By This Pillar

  1. It is impossible to inadvertently change a customer's current plan, making it safe to test new plan iterations.
  2. The entirety of a pricing model for a product is retrievable as a single data source, with no chance to overlook out-of-band discounts and adjustments.
  3. The authoritative pricing model definition can provide the data to drive a pricing page and other product marketing content, with no chance of divergence or contradiction.

Using This Pillar in Isolation

Application code should only be concerned with the names of features and use run-time PriceOps tooling to determine whether to deliver a feature to a customer. This allows Product and Marketing teams to iterate on plan definitions freely.

However, without integration of Customer Schedule management, Metering, and Entitlement Checking, application code cannot remain fully agnostic as to the plan that a customer is currently on. Thus, it is tempting to hard-code plan names into application code, preventing iterative experimentation. Care must be taken to ensure that application code remains properly isolated from pricing model definition.