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Pricing in depth

Pricing models

A price supplies a tier ladder. The pricing model decides how that ladder is read. It lives on the product, not on the price, so every price on a product is read the same way.

Three models. The same four tiers produce three different totals, and the difference is not small, so it is worth working through once.

Throughout this page we use one ladder, in Swiss francs:

Seats	Rate per seat
up to 5	CHF 159
5 – 15	CHF 139
15 – 50	CHF 109
above 50	CHF 89

Volume

One rate applies to every unit. Find the tier the total quantity lands in, and charge all units at that rate.

A customer with 20 seats lands in the 15–50 tier, so every seat costs CHF 109:

Code
20 seats × CHF 109 = CHF 2,180.00

Not 5 at 159 and the rest cheaper. All twenty at 109, because the total landed there.

Volume is what people usually mean by "volume discount": grow enough and your whole bill gets cheaper, including the units you were already buying. It is the friendlier model for the customer and the easier one to explain in a sales call.

Staircase

Each band is charged at its own rate, and the bands are added together. Also called graduated or tiered pricing.

The same 20 seats are now split across three bands:

Code
first  5 seats × CHF 159 =  CHF   795.00
next  10 seats × CHF 139 =  CHF 1,390.00   (seats 6–15)
next   5 seats × CHF 109 =  CHF   545.00   (seats 16–20)
                            ─────────────
                            CHF 2,730.00

CHF 550 more than volume, from identical tiers. That gap is the entire reason this page exists.

Staircase never reduces what a customer already pays: crossing into a cheaper band only makes the next units cheaper. The total cost curve bends but never drops, which is what the price editor draws for you:

✕

Read the shape rather than the numbers. Each bend is a tier boundary. The line keeps climbing, just less steeply, because earlier seats keep their old rate.

Package

Units are sold in blocks. Instead of a rate per unit, you charge per pack, and a partial pack costs a whole pack.

Selling API calls in packs of 100,000 at CHF 50:

Code
  250,000 calls  ->  3 packs  ->  CHF 150.00
      1 call     ->  1 pack   ->  CHF  50.00

The rounding is the point. Package suits things with a real unit cost per batch, and it makes revenue predictable, but a customer who uses one call over a boundary pays for a whole pack. Say so in the plan description.

Package requires a usage-based product, because a pack only makes sense against something a meter counts. Pairing it with a flat-fee or per-seat product is rejected at creation.

Which to choose

If you want	Use
Growth to make the whole bill cheaper	Volume
Early units to keep their price	Staircase
To sell in fixed batches	Package
Simplicity above all	No tiers at all — a single list_price

Going deeper

A ladder does not have to be constant numbers. Each tier can compute its rate instead of stating it.

Topic	What it adds
Price formulas	A tier rate computed from an expression, for example cost * 1.15
Rate tables	Lookup and bracket tables a formula reads from
Costs	The upstream cost a margin formula multiplies
Key sets	One product, many priced variants: TLDs, regions, SKUs

Reference

Topic	When you need it
Prices	Creating the ladder these models read
Products	Where pricing_model is set, and why it is immutable
Prices API	tiers[], up_to, unit_amount, flat_amount