Pay-As-You-Go Pricing Challenge
Recently, our friend Jacob posted a Pay-As-You-Go Pricing challenge to the DM Community. You can find his challenge here. Pay-As-You-Go SaaS pricing models enable customers to pay only for what they use. In general, SaaS pricing can be challenging to calculate, especially when dealing with volume discounts and other incentives. I tackle this challenge using our SMARTS™ decision management platform. One of my tried-and-true shortcuts is that I take advantage of test cases when writing my pricing rules. Click here to watch my demo
SaaS Pricing Key Takeaways
First, as I mentioned above, using test cases (to test against expected outcome) saves a ton of time. While I ran into several typos in my data entry, I felt confident that my rules were correct (after correcting the data entry). Second, seeing is believing. Being able to see what the rules assign to each tier allows for a quick understanding of what I had left to do. Third, not seeing calculations in place would have likely taken me a lot more time (and headache) to complete the challenge. I rely on intermediate calculations when rules end up somewhat convoluted.
While this is a simple pricing use case, business rules can quickly become a combinatorial explosion of scenarios. I cover more on pricing engines. Decompose your problem in a few simple steps, check your progress, and go through all of your test cases. Here’s how I’ve decomposed the problem:
- What is my starting tier?
- Do I need to move any extra units to the next tier?
- Do I need to apply any special incentive?
If you want to try building the demo yourself with SMARTS™, feel free to ask for a free evaluation.
Learn more about Decision Management and Sparkling Logic’s SMARTS™ Data-Powered Decision Manager