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Changing Service Pricing in Sonar: Best Practices

Mitchell Paul-Soumis Updated by Mitchell Paul-Soumis

Read Time: 3 mins

Raising prices is a normal process. Rising infrastructure costs, equipment costs, and backhaul costs all affect your bottom line. These costs need to be considered when billing your subscribers. As a result, cost reevaluation might require a price increase of some or all subscriber services. Deploying these increases could influence the relationship with your subscribers, so knowing your options and minimizing disruptions is of the utmost importance.

This article assumes you already have a working knowledge of Services in Sonar.

Managing Service Pricing

There are two approaches you can take when increasing the price of services offered in your Sonar instance:

  1. Increasing the price for new subscribers only
  2. Increasing prices for all subscribers universally

Generally speaking, limiting price increases to new subscribers is far simpler. Limiting the change in this way minimizes the burden of notification, reduces call volume from current subscribers, and still benefits your bottom line. However, it's still worth noting how you can accomplish either or both of these methods.

Increasing Pricing For New Subscribers

When increasing prices for new subscribers, the easiest approach is by disabling the old service, leaving it active on existing subscribers and converting it into a legacy service, then creating a new service.

  1. Head to Settings → Billing → Services & Packages and Disable the old service.
    Disabling the service will prevent staff from assigning it to subscriber accounts in the future by removing it as an available option, while leaving it in place for current subscribers. Renaming the service is also an option, however, this change will show up on subscriber invoices.
  2. On the same page, create a new service with the updated pricing. It can reuse the same name as the previous service, as disabling the old service will prevent it from being selected.
    For instructions on creating a new service, you can check out our Services Overview, Building a Data Service, and Deploying Voice Services in Sonar articles.
Alternative Method For New Subscribers

Rather than deactivating the service, an alternative approach relies on Price Overrides for existing subscribers. This allows you to modify the service directly, without needing to deactivate, rename, and recreate.

  1. Apply a Price Override to each account that currently subscribes to the service that is being updated.
    1. This can be done one at a time, or programmatically with the GraphQL API. Depending on the size of your subscriber base, using the API is highly recommended.
      Doing this operation through GraphQL will only affect one account at a time. If this operation is being performed on a significant number of accounts, consider leveraging automation with Postman or other scripting.
      mutation priceOverride($input: UpdateAccountServiceMutationInput) {
        updateAccountService(input: $input, id: XXX) {
          id
          account_id
          service_id
          quantity
          price_override
          price_override_reason
          name_override
        }
      }

      {
        "input": {
          "quantity": 1,
          "price_override": 9000,
          "price_override_reason": "Price Override Reason",
          "name_override": "Name Override"
        }
      }
  2. Update the price of the service from Settings → Billing → Services & Packages. The next customer that subscribes to this service will be charged the new price, while legacy subscriptions will maintain the overridden price until they change their service to something else.

Increasing Prices For All Subscribers

Increasing prices for all subscribers is comparatively straightforward, although it should not be done without first notifying your subscribers and your front-line staff of this change.

Before increasing prices, ensure that you refer to your State or Country guidelines for minimum notice periods before issuing the notice.
  1. Communicate the upcoming price change to your subscribers.
    1. Depending on the size of your subscriber base, you could notify them on an individual basis. However, it is usually best to leverage a Mass Message, which allows you to email all your subscriber's based on their service.
      A Mass Message can be used even if you're increasing the price of multiple services. Simply add additional filters to include all services.
  2. Increase the price of the Service in your instance settings. This will charge the increased price to subscribers with this service on any billing runs, starting the next day.
    When you change the Service Price, you cannot future date the change. Ensure that the price change is only done on the day listed in the notification sent to subscribers.

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