This Zuora pricing guide provides an honest account of the platform’s features and its various subscription options. In the interests of offering a fair reflection of the current market, this guide will also make three recommendations on potential alternatives — just in case Zuora isn’t quite ticking the right boxes. That’s the aim here at Vertice: supercharging your SaaS spend management, regardless of the solutions you need.

What Zuora can do for you

The majority of Vertice customers approach us with the same problem: we don’t have the financial or technological resources to effectively enhance our SaaS operations. 

The other side of the same argument is that SaaS providers also often lack the means to manage their customers’ subscriptions and maintain healthy relationships with buyers. 

We make a lot of noise about the average number of SaaS subscriptions present in modern businesses. For popular providers such as Zoom and Slack, keeping on top of customer subscriptions requires scalable and innovative solutions.

Coiner of the term ‘subscription economy’, Zuora provides a range of SaaS management tools for businesses utilizing a subscription-service model. By helping to shift market focus from the one-time sale of products, Zuora — and the subscription economy philosophy as a whole — is committed to delivering recurring, people-centric business services.

Zuora processes over $96 billion a year. Its main products include:

• Zuora Billing:
  • Evolve and adapt your products, services and pricing strategies to reflect shifts in customer and market demands;
  • Design, deploy and iterate complex billing solutions that help keep you competitive, deliver ongoing value and retain customers;
  • Support any combination of recurring, one-time or consumption price models;
  • Capture, consolidate and monetize consumption data in one place.

• Zuora Payments:
  • Centrally manage the complexities of subscription payment transactions across multiple gateways, payment methods and currencies;
  • In partnership with Microsoft, deploy robust fraud protection measures throughout the subscription lifecycle using machine learning and device fingerprinting;
  • Recover failed and delinquent payments and transfer all transactions to a finance subledger.

• Zuora Revenue:
  • Reduce risk and minimize accounting costs with an automated solution that recognizes all subscription payment models;
  • Aggregate orders, invoices and other revenue-related data into a single contract;
  • Establish revenue recognition rules for all pricing models and account for contractual changes in pricing, quantity and SLAs;
  • Reduce the revenue contract review process by up to 85%.

• Zuora CPQ:
  • Make use of purpose-built quoting software that accommodates any combination of subscriptions, products and services throughout the entire lifecycle;
  • Enable your sales teams to move faster and send quotes with ease;
  • Create accurate quotes that can adjust to changes in platform features and other aspects of the subscription;
  • Gain visibility into subscriber history to track overall trends and inform the next iteration of flexible subscription options.

• Zephyr:
  • Understand your customers, experiment with subscriber journeys and create personalized offers;
  • Consider subscriber history, product usage, preferences and behaviors to inform targeted offers and upselling ventures;
  • Integrate customer data into your CRM to help build long-lasting relationships through tailored subscription packages.

Zuora pricing structures and tiers

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Zuora hides its pricing structures and tiers online. Its business model centers on nurturing customer relationships, so the company is keen for prospective subscribers to contact the sales team to discuss a quote. 

Mitigating slightly against pricing obscurity is the availability of a free trial for new customers, although Zuora doesn’t specify how long this trial lasts or which features it includes.

What is for certain in terms of Zuora pricing is that subscription plans will be flexible. Customers can select exactly which Zuora products or opt for access to Zuora’s entire platform. 

Pricing obfuscation has hampered SaaS users for many years, but Vertice’s customer purchasing teams bypass this frustration by leveraging unique market insight. We have access to transactional records of vendor sales, understanding precisely what companies have paid for their subscriptions. 

We then use this insight during SaaS contract negotiations to drive a hard bargain — all with the aim of securing your organization the right plan at the right price. We have no vested interest here, we simply wish to bring an end to unsustainable levels of waste and neglect in SaaS purchasing and contract management.

Additional Zuora costs to consider

With Zuora pricing hidden, it’s not clear whether there are any popular add-ons to Zuora subscriptions. Additional seats on your plan will likely be the main consideration here. 

Other vendors offering subscription management solutions

Vertice aims to reduce SaaS spend via targeted negotiation and tactical procurement operations – a process requiring organizations to choose from a shortlist of potential options for each software type. 

Zuora is one subscription management solution, but there are others out there. Let’s take a quick look at three alternative options. 

Zuora pricing vs Recurly

The Recurly platform offers many similar features to Zuora, including subscriber and churn management, payments orchestration, billing functionality, and reporting and analytics tools for insights into customer lifecycles. 

Recurly pricing is slightly more visible than Zuora, with three subscription tiers on offer, as follows:

• Starter — For startups and SMBs not long since launch, looking to grow their subscription business fast: $239 per month. 

With the Starter plan, if revenue is less than the equivalent of £30,000 a month, new customers can access this package completely free of charge for their first year.

• Professional — For midsize companies ready to scale: contact sales.
• Elite — For enterprises with large payment volumes: contact sales.

Recurly offers new customers a 30-day free trial. 

Zuora pricing vs Chargebee

Chargebee’s products focus more specifically on billing processes and the recovery of failed payments, though it does also provide analytics and insights to help reduce customer churn. 

Chargebee pricing is more easily available than both Zuora and Recurly and comes in three tiers:

• Starter — For ambitious but small subscription companies. This package is completely free up to $250,000 of cumulative billing, at which point Chargebee will charge 0.75% on all billing thereafter. Pay as you go and enjoy the freedom of no annual commitments. 
• Performance — For companies laying the foundation for rapid growth: $599pm up to $100,000pm and 0.75% thereafter. Annual commitments are required.
• Enterprise — For leading companies driving continued growth: contact sales.

New customers can decide on the number of days available within a free trial.

Zuora pricing vs BillingPlatform

BillingPlatform’s products facilitate smoother lifecycle processes from subscriptions to usage-based pricing models and everything in between. Billing automation, integrations, reporting, insights and the prevention of revenue leakage are among the platform’s capabilities.

BillingPlatform pricing and information on subscription tiers isn’t available online, but there’s a 14-day free trial for new customers. 

Zuora pricing — the Vertice verdict

Zuora’s Billing, Payments, Revenue and CPQ products allows subscription-based businesses to regain control of their price models, minimize revenue leakage and lengthen the customer lifecycle. 

And through the Zephyr product, Zuora subscribers can leverage actionable insights from customer data to better anticipate their changing needs.

However, with Zuora pricing information so limited, it’s tricky to accurately position the company in the current market. It’s not uncommon in the world of SaaS for pricing to be obscured, but Recurly and Chargebee both outperform Zuora here. BillingPlatform takes a similar approach to Zuora in hiding its price points and subscription tiers.

Recurly and Chargebee offer fantastic deals for new customers, where access to their products is free at the point of entry and up to a specific revenue window and time frame. Chargebee’s Starter plan doesn’t even demand an annual commitment, which could be invaluable for smaller businesses just dipping their toes in subscription management.

In any case, all of the providers mentioned in this pricing guide offer free trials of their products, giving new customers the chance to test them out before making a commitment.

For more information on how Vertice’s customer purchasing teams can negotiate optimized SaaS products on your behalf — and how our SaaS Purchasing Platform keeps contracts under control — click on the link and get in touch.