Pricing Plans

Pricing plans define the pricing and policies that allow you to control how you provide services to subscribers and how you are paid for those services. Pricing plans are comprised of catalog items, offers, bundles, and supporting objects required to implement pricing.

Catalog items are the pricing items that you offer to subscribers. Catalog items are extensions of offers or bundles that have been customized for a specific group of subscribers. Offers contain pricing and policy components, and a list of the balances and meters to impact during rating. The pricing and policy components are comprised of items that enable you to select different rates, policies, and balances in real-time, based on variable conditions that are valid during rating.

• A product offer includes:
  • A product.
  • A pricing item such as a price or policy component to be valid and compiled. For more information, see the discussion about product offers.
  • A collection of configurable pricing parameters with default values.
• A price component is a charge, discount, grant, refund, forfeiture, or deposit. Each price component implements the business logic that determines how products and services are charged for when network messages are received and recurring pricing occurs.
• A policy component implements the business logic that decides which policy profile to return to a PCRF (Sy policy) or PCEF (Gx policy) for a given set of usage circumstances. Policy components enable you to track a subscriber's service usage and change that subscriber's quality of service (QoS) based on that usage.
• A balance is a pricing object that represents a currency or asset quantity that is updated by subscriber usage and pricing, and can be used to influence policy decisions. Balances can have credit limits and thresholds set on them and can have associated filters that determine when they can be used.
• A meter is a pricing object that tracks subscriber usage or charges against a balance. Meters can have credit limits and thresholds set on them and can be used to apply different rates or policies.
• A decision table is a multi-dimensional matrix that contains one or more normalizers that together define a condition set. Decision tables can be used by rate tables, policy tables, GL transaction type tables, GL account tables, balance filters, and offer priority generators to assign a decision result to each condition set.

Figure 1 illustrates several product offers in a pricing plan.

The five product offers in Figure 1 can be included in a bundle, allowing you to sell all five offers as a single unit. Each product offer in a bundle can include one or more products, each representing a different service. You then create a catalog item from a bundle, adding any pricing changes or commercial items that it requires.

Each offer or bundle can be used to create multiple catalog items as needed. This enables you to create elaborate charging and discounting models and take a create once, update everywhere approach to pricing. This results in fewer items in a pricing plan, which makes it easier to manage additions and changes. For more information, see the discussions about catalog item revisions, product offers, and product offer versions and revisions.