10 Features to Check Out in Your Subscription Management Sol

10 Features to Check Out in Your Subscription

Management Solution

What is a Subscription Management Solution?

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

Manages the purchases of a SaaS application – also called as subscription

Keeps track of the customers and what they are using

Manages the billing process

Helps in communication with customer

Monitors payment status and takes appropriate action

Why should SaaS ISVs Automate Their Subscription Process?

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

• SaaS is a volume game, and hence, the effort required for managing subscription is only going to get higher and higher.

Volume Game

• Managing subscriptions manually is highly prone to errors. These errors can have a huge impact on the trust that customers have on the service provider.

Error Prone

• There can be so many variations in the way an ISV can charge the customers. Keeping track of all these variations is a humongous task.

Variations

Variations in SaaS Business Model

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

Let’s look at few scenarios that can give you an idea on the variations you can bring in your SaaS Subscription model

Variation #1

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

Tenant A – has subscribed to modules ‘X’, ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ at a monthly flat cost of 100 USD, and will be paying it in a pre-paid model (i.e. the

payment will be made at the start of the month).

Variation #2

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

Tenant B – has subscribed to the same set of modules just like Tenant A, but will be paying on a usage based model. It will be a monthly (base) flat cost of 25 USD plus 1

USD per transaction, which will be done through the SaaS system. For example, if this tenant has done 53 transactions in a given month, then they will be paying 25 + 53 = 78

USD on a post-paid model.

Variation #3

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

Tenant C - has subscribed to modules ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘X’ at a monthly flat cost of 125 USD, but will be on SaaS trial mode for the first 30 days. So, the first 30 days of usage by this customer

should not be considered for SaaS invoicing (or rather for applying cost). Your SaaS solution should be able to differentiate between a paying customers, non-paying customers, paying

customers currently on trial mode and non-paying customers on trial mode.

Variation #4

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

Reseller A – this SaaS reseller has access to all modules. However, as an ISV you may want to control what modules can be available for which resellers. This is required when your solution serves multiple domains,

and hence you may have domain based resellers. For SaaS resellers, you will be billing 20% of the total revenue accrued by that reseller in that month. In order to do that you should know the exact data on the

revenues that have come through the tenants boarded by this reseller.

Variation #5

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

Tenant D – has subscribed to only one module ‘C’ at a monthly flat cost of 125 USD, but will be paying it in a post-paid model (i.e. the payment will be made at the end of the month). In

addition to this, there is a usage limitation that has to be applied for this tenant. For example, this tenant can only perform 100 transactions per month, beyond that the system

should restrict the transactions.

Top 10 Key features

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

Top 10 Key Features

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

• Publish multiple editions of SaaS product

• Allows you to create a package by grouping the modules available in your SaaS product.

• Helps ISVs price their modules individually, which will benefit both ISVs and customers.

Package Management

• One of the most complex features in subscription management.

• ISV should be able to define multiple price plans for the same package.

• For example, Document Management System - Premium Package can have 3 pricing plans. Monthly Plan at $40, Quarterly Plan at $100 and Yearly Plan at $300.

Pricing Plan

#1

#2

Top 10 Key Features

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

• Trials that can be used by potential customers to evaluate the SaaS application.

• Allows ISV to create subscriptions with trial support.

• For example, I can create a Silver Package with trial for 20 days. When a customer signs up to this subscription they will get the first 20 days as free and the billing will apply only from the 21st day.

• In some cases ISVs can also decide to offer a lighter version as completely free forever. This scenario should also be supported. However, the most interesting feature is on the insights that

• ISVs can get increase conversion rate through Tenant Analytics. Hot Trials (or leads) recording a high usage of your system, which means they are in the happy path

• Trials recording low usage of your system, which means they are either not happy about what they see or is stuck up with some road block.

Trial Analytics

#3

Top 10 Key Features

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

• Value based pricing models provides an attractive pricing model for SMB segment.

• With Value based pricing model the customer gets charged based on certain attributes that can reflect the amount of usage by that customer.

• For example, in a SaaS based recruitment system customer can be charged based on the number of candidates ($X per candidate) recruited through the system.

• Pricing plan can describe how this metered data should be used for cost calculation.

• Slab based pricing and Fixed cost pricing are 2 common ways used in the industry.

• For example, Fixed cost could be $25 for each person recruited through the system. Whereas for the trading system it could be 1% upto .5mn, 0.8% for >.5mn and <1mn, 0.5% for >1mn, which is a slab based pricing.

Usage Based Billing

#4

Top 10 Key Features

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

• Tax and Discount components are vital in an invoice and can change from customer to customer.

• ISVs can publish various discount codes, which can be applied by the customers.

• Once the code is applied appropriate discount should reflect in the invoices.

• In some cases Discount line items can also be used for manual cost adjustments.

Tax/Discount Support

• Billing engine of subscription management solution should be able to automatically generate invoices based on the subscription plan.

• ISVs should be able to set the date for monthly and quarterly invoice generation.

• In case of metering, invoices should calculate the exact amount based on the values set in the pricing plan.

Invoices

#5

#6

Top 10 Key Features

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

• Billing can happen either on a pre-paid model or post paid model.

• In a pre-paid model invoices are raised at the start date of the subscription and the customer will be charged immediately. Post paid models are the ones where the invoice is raised after the subscription end date.

• ISVs can choose to operate on either of the models, or even both.

Pre-Paid / Post Paid Billing

• Support all major credit cards. Customers should be able to enter the credit card details while sign-up or before the billing date.

• In case if the subscription management solution is storing the credit card details then it should carry PCI Compliance certificate.

• Pay Pal could be another alternative to credit cards as many companies have corporate pay pal accounts.

• When a credit card transaction fails it has to go through a retry policy where the card might be tried for few more times before concluding it as a permanent failure.

Credit Card / Pay Pal Support

#7

#8

Top 10 Key Features

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

• Customer should be able to find all the details pertaining to their bills.

• Customer portal should provide them with details about their current subscription, past invoices and current charges.

• Allow customers to upgrade and downgrade their subscriptions

Customer Portal

• Notifications are those communications that go to the customer all through their engagement with the SaaS provider.

• Trial period expiration, Reminders, Credit card reminder, invoice mail, payment reminder, payment success/failure, usage alerts – are all examples of notifications that can go out to customers.

Notifications

#9

#10

TechCello – Tested and Proven Framework

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

Starting your SaaS Business Model is almost same as the above example. You do not want to focus on the basic engineering aspects and building blocks. Moreover, it’s better to pick something that is tested and proven rather than trying to reinvent.

TechCello offers an end to end SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution that can help in designing, developing and managing the operations of your SaaS product.

Using TechCello you can simply focus on building your product functionalities, and TechCello can take care of the rest.

TechCello is tested and proven SaaS Framework, built exclusively to meet the typical SaaS needs of your business and product.

TechCello offers more than 30+ modules covering all the basic engineering blocks and operational modules.

Apart from saving significant amount of cost, your precious time can be well spent on differentiating your product from competitors through unique product features.

About TechCello

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

Techcello is a cloud-ready, SaaS Application Development Framework

Can be used to,

Build new SaaS products

Convert single-tenant Apps to Multi-Tenant

Migrate on premise products to SaaS model

Cello framework is delivered as a set of libraries and APIs that can be easily integrated to your product

Applications built using Cello can be deployed in any cloud

Cello contains building blocks for developing, monetizing and servicing your SaaS offering.

Contact Us

SaaS Life Cycle Management Solution

http://www.techcello.com

[email protected]

@techcello