Alguna 101

This glossary explains key billing concepts with examples from companies you probably use every day.

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Billable Metrics

Units of measurement that determine how much a customer pays based on their actual usage. Real-world examples:

• Twilio bills per SMS sent or API call made
• AWS S3 bills per gigabyte of storage used
• Snowflake bills per compute credit consumed
• Slack bills per active user in a workspace

Billable metrics let you charge customers fairly based on the value they receive, rather than a fixed fee regardless of usage.

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CPQ / Quotes

Configure, Price, Quote — the process of creating customized pricing proposals for enterprise customers with complex needs. Real-world examples:

• Salesforce enterprise deals with custom user counts, add-ons, and multi-year terms
• HubSpot packages combining Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub at negotiated rates
• Snowflake committed-use contracts with volume discounts based on projected consumption

CPQ streamlines sales by letting reps build accurate quotes without manual calculations. The quote becomes the contract, which becomes the subscription.

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Discounts

Price reductions applied to subscriptions or specific products. Real-world examples:

• Spotify offers 50% off for students
• GitHub provides free or discounted plans for startups and nonprofits
• Annual billing discounts — most SaaS companies offer 15-20% off for paying yearly instead of monthly
• Volume discounts — Slack gives lower per-seat pricing as team size grows

Discounts can be percentage-based (20% off), fixed amount ($50 off), or volume-based (price drops at certain thresholds).

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Currencies

Support for billing customers in their local currency. Real-world examples:

• Netflix charges €12.99 in Germany, ¥1,490 in Japan, $15.49 in the US
• Shopify displays pricing in local currencies while settling in USD
• Stripe handles currency conversion automatically for global sellers

Multi-currency billing reduces cart abandonment and improves customer experience by eliminating exchange rate surprises.

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Customers

Entities that subscribe to your product or service. A customer profile contains billing details, usage data, subscription status, and payment methods. Real-world examples:

• In Slack, a customer is an organization with a workspace
• In Figma, a customer might be a design agency with multiple teams
• In AWS, a customer is an account that can have thousands of users underneath

Customers can have multiple subscriptions, payment methods, and billing contacts.

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Customer Portal

A self-service interface where customers manage their own billing without contacting support. Real-world examples:

• Notion lets customers upgrade/downgrade, add seats, and update payment methods
• Zoom allows customers to view invoices, change plans, and manage add-ons
• Atlassian provides usage dashboards showing active users across products

A good customer portal reduces support tickets and empowers customers to make changes instantly.

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Invoices

Detailed bills listing what the customer owes, including line items, taxes, and totals. Real-world examples:

• Monthly Slack invoice: Base plan ($8.75/user × 50 users =$437.50) + taxes
• AWS invoice: Hundreds of line items for EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, etc.
• Stripe invoice: Platform fees, connect charges, and payouts itemized

Invoices can be sent automatically on a schedule or generated manually for one-time charges.

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Payment Transactions

The process of collecting money from customers — capturing funds, processing through payment gateways, and recording for accounting. Real-world examples:

• Credit card charges processed through Stripe or Adyen
• ACH bank transfers for larger B2B transactions
• Wire transfers for enterprise contracts
• Auto-pay where saved cards are charged automatically when invoices are due

Different payment methods have different processing times, fees, and failure rates.

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Pricing Models

The structure that determines how products are billed. See Pricing Models for detailed configuration options.

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Products / Product Catalog

The specific offerings your company sells, organized in a catalog. Real-world examples:

• Atlassian’s catalog: Jira, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket (each sold separately or bundled)
• Microsoft 365: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, OneDrive (bundled into plans)
• Zoom: Meetings (core product) + Webinars, Rooms, Phone (add-ons)

Products can be:

• Fixed — same price regardless of usage (e.g., a software license)
• Metered — price varies based on consumption (e.g., API calls)

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Usage Metering

Tracking customer consumption to calculate what they owe. Real-world examples:

• OpenAI tracks tokens consumed per API call
• Datadog measures hosts monitored and logs ingested
• Vercel counts bandwidth used and serverless function invocations
• MongoDB Atlas monitors storage, operations, and data transfer

Usage metering enables consumption-based pricing where customers pay proportionally to the value they receive.

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Plans

Predefined packages with specific features, limits, and prices. Real-world examples: Plans simplify buying decisions by bundling features into clear options. Enterprise plans often serve as starting templates for custom negotiations.

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Self-Serve Checkout

The process where customers sign up and pay without talking to sales. Real-world examples:

• Canva — select plan, enter card, start designing in 30 seconds
• Notion — upgrade from free to team plan with a few clicks
• Vercel — connect GitHub, pick a plan, deploy immediately

Self-serve checkout captures customers 24/7, reduces sales costs for smaller deals, and provides instant gratification.

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Subscriptions

An ongoing agreement where customers pay recurring fees for access to products or services. Real-world examples:

• Simple subscription: Spotify Premium at $10.99/month with monthly billing
• Annual contract: Salesforce at $1,500/user/year billed annually
• Complex subscription: Enterprise deal with base platform fee + per-seat charges + usage overages + multi-year commitment + annual price escalators

Subscriptions have:

• Billing schedule — when invoices generate (monthly, quarterly, annually)
• Contract terms — commitment length and renewal rules
• Price changes — how upgrades, downgrades, and renewals are handled

A single customer can have multiple subscriptions (e.g., separate subscriptions for different products or departments).