Plans your marketing team will actually ask for
The plans that sell are rarely the plans that are easy to model. “Three months free high-speed broadband, then £9.95 a month from month four, with a one-off setup fee of £10” is an ordinary promotion and an awkward thing to express in a rigid pricing table.
The OpenBRM bundle manager builds that plan as a single sellable product. A free period, a recurring charge that starts later, and a one-off fee sit together on one order line, priced as one package, and the billing process works out what falls due in each period.
What you can express
- Introductory free or discounted periods followed by standard pricing
- One-off setup, activation and equipment fees alongside recurring charges
- Multi-product packages sold and priced as one item
- Included allowances — minutes, data, units — consumed before overage is rated
- Tiered and volume pricing, with the tier chosen from actual consumption
Change the offer without changing the code
Bundles are configuration, not development. New promotional plans go live by building them in the bundle manager, which means the people who design the offer can build it, and a pricing change does not need a release.
How product bundling reaches the invoice
Bundled products behave like any other order line at billing time. Included allowances are drawn down first, overage passes to the rating engine, and the whole package appears on the customer's single invoice for the period. Discounts, the tiered pricing engine and collections rules apply as configured.
A worked example: discount by product category
The documentation walks through a simple pricing rule that shows how configuration and plug-ins work together. First, a meta field called Discount, with the decimal data type, is added to products. Next, the DiscountPricingTask plug-in is switched on under the Product pricing category, pointed at the discounted product category and given a default discount of 10 percent. From then on, any product in that category is priced with its discount when it is added to an order.
In the example, order 203 holds two products: Banners at US$100.00 and Discounted Banners at US$90.00, for a total of US$190.00. The lower price is applied automatically and shows on the invoice, with no change to code.
Packages and pricing rules together
Packages decide what is sold together; pricing plug-ins decide how each part is priced. Keeping the two separate means a marketing team can launch a new offer from existing products while finance keeps control of discount rules in one place. Both are applied in the same billing run, so the invoice always reflects the current offer. Because both are configuration, a new offer can be built and checked on a trial installation before it reaches customers, and tiered or volume pricing still applies on top, with the tier picked from what the customer actually used.
Billing frequency is set per plan with order periods: monthly, quarterly, or any other number of days, weeks, months or years. That lets an annual package and a monthly add-on sit on the same account and still bill correctly.
Subscription management · Rating engine · Billing process documentation · Open source BSS · Oracle BRM alternative