Subscription-Based Pricing

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What Does Subscription-Based Pricing Mean?

Subscription-based pricing is a common pricing strategy practiced by different kinds of IT vendors. It is now popular in the provision of cloud services, where vendors often deliver software capability over the Web.

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Techopedia Explains Subscription-Based Pricing

The idea of subscription-based pricing is that clients subscribe to a service over time. Typically, subscriptions will run from one month to another. This model is similar to the monthly billing cycles used by utilities and other kinds of vendor-provided services. In subscription-based pricing, the client typically has the ability to renew or cancel services every month.

In agreements between cloud computing providers and clients, subscription-based pricing competes with other pricing models such as consumption-based pricing, where clients pay for each unit of use, and market-based pricing, where prices are adjusted according to supply and demand, as well as other factors. Many of these pricing models will be evident in service-level agreements that help to define how cloud providers offer their services to clients. Experts expect cloud computing pricing models to get more complex over time, and recommend careful review of a service-level agreement before any final deal is made.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.