Traditional Recurring Subscription

This guide explains how to implement a subscription-only pricing model.

In this model, customers pay a fixed recurring fee for access to your product. There is no usage-based billing or overages.

You are building a SaaS product that charges customers based on seats.

Your pricing model:

There are no overage charges in this version. The subscription fee covers access to the product.

This is the simplest pricing model.

Even though billing is not usage-based, it is still important to define what the customer is paying for.

In this example:

You may still track seat usage internally, but it is not required for billing in this model.

This ensures the subscription is charged at the start of each cycle.

Once assigned, the customer will be billed the subscription amount each billing period.

A customer is subscribed for one full billing period.

There are no additional charges, regardless of how the product is used.

Even though seats are not used for billing in this example, you may still want to track them.

You can do this by:

This allows you to:

Subscription-only pricing is best when:

Even if you are not billing based on usage, your system is still generating cost.

You can (and should) meter the underlying activity that drives your product, such as:

This data is not used for billing in this model, but it is critical for:

These usage signals can be attributed to internal systems and analyzed separately from billing.

For internal cost tracking and attribution, see: WorkloadsWorkloads

Many products start with subscription-only pricing and later expand to:

See the hybrid subscription guide for adding included usage and overage billing.

This model provides simplicity and predictability, while still allowing you to understand the underlying cost structure of your product.