The Unit You Actually Sell

Whatever price list you launch with is not the one you will be running in a year. A competitor moves, a market turns out to be poorer or richer than you expected, a promotion works and you want to keep it. The question that decides how well a platform handles that is not whether it supports subscriptions, because they all do. It is whether changing an offer is an afternoon or a project. When a package is a record with a handful of fields, adding a cheaper tier for one market is somebody typing for five minutes. When pricing lives in code or in three systems that have to agree, the same change is a release, and the practical effect is that you stop making them.

Every operator eventually raises prices, and the moment they do they discover whether their platform can hold two truths at once. The people who signed up at the old price expect to keep it, at least for a while, and the new price has to apply to everybody arriving from now on. If a package can only be edited in place, those two things are in direct conflict and somebody ends up angry. Marking a package inactive instead solves it completely. The old package stops being offered and carries on billing the people who hold it. The new one takes over for everybody else. It is an unglamorous switch that quietly prevents the single most common cause of angry cancellations, and it costs nothing to use correctly. Who is on which package is visible through the subscribers manager.

A package is deliberately small, and the behaviour around it lives in settings that apply to all of them. Grace periods for failed payments, what cancelling actually does, whether premium viewers still see advertising, how many screens a purchase opens on, the currency you charge in and a test mode for rehearsing the whole flow before real money moves. Keeping those separate is what stops every package from carrying a copy of the same rules, and it means changing the grace period is one decision rather than one per plan. Those settings and the gateways behind them are described under the subscribers manager, and the recurring billing they drive under the subscriptions system.

A package created once appears on the website, in the mobile apps and on television, because all of them read the same list rather than each carrying their own idea of what you sell. That matters most when a price changes, since the alternative is a period where the web says one thing and an app says another and your support inbox explains the difference. Purchases made inside the iOS and Android apps go through the stores' own billing and carry the renewal terms those stores require, so an app passes review rather than bouncing back. Where subscriptions are only part of how you earn, they sit beside rentals and purchases, discounts and gift vouchers, all under one set of monetization models.