Price Plan Builder

You can control pretty much every aspect of Hydra’s price plans and services, from units of measurement to the method of charging subscription fees according to the reason the preceding period closed.

Managing Services

To add a service to the billing, you just have to add it in the product catalog, choose a providing scheme and assign a price:

Done. Customers now can access the service.

Plans, Quotas, Time Intervals

Simple Price Plans

Add Internet access services to the price plan and rate user traffic.

Here you can see a price plan worth 1,999 Indian rupees per month with unlimited traffic and bandwidth limitation up to 10 Mbit/s for incoming and outgoing Internet traffic.

Quotas and Limits

Hydra can change prices, bandwidth limit and other parameters of services depending on the amount of services a customer uses. Include a prepaid traffic package (quota) in the price plan. After it’s used up, rate each next megabyte as you like.

In this example, a subscriber gets 10,000 MB of incoming traffic for $25 per month. After this quota is reached, each additional 10 MB will cost him or her 3 cents.

You can also change parameters of access, such as speed. The billing will automatically generate an event for provisioning to change the access speed.

In more complex situations, you can set a few limits that will be applied one after another.

Here you can see a price plan with high speed for the first 50,000 MB. The speed drops to 20 Mbit/s for the next 50,000 MB, and after this quota is reached, to 1 Mbit/s.

The same quotas can be set for telephony services. Include call minutes packages for certain areas in the subscription fee.

Time Intervals

Time intervals allow you to set different prices for the same services depending on the time.

Set discounts for nighttime calls, and Hydra will consider it while rating the CDR. You can renew the list of time intervals and set their configuration. Each interval could be assigned a quota.

Time intervals also work for Internet access. Set different speeds for different times of the day, and the billing will monitor the change of time intervals, generating commands to change parameters of access.

Specialized Price Plans

Besides usual methods of rating, Hydra supports:

• burstable rating,
• rating based on predominant inbound/outbound traffic, and
• rating based on weighted predominant inbound/outbound traffic.

Such price plans are common for backbone providers and data centers.

Price Plan Options

Modern billing must support price plan options. This could be a one-off service of immediately sending a detailed service statement to an e-mail, a “turbo” button, or an extra subscription to a pay-TV channel package. The options increase the ARPU, and some providers base all their price plans policies on them.

Hydra has it all—just add a set of options in a price plan.

A customer can pick the options he or she wants in the self-care portal.

If some options can be accessed only through the provider (e.g., services for organizations that require signing documents), specify it in the providing scheme of a price plan option.

Bundle Deals

Hydra supports double play and triple play packages. Include a fixed set of services in the price plan, for instance, access to the Internet, phone and TV.

Set bundles (package discounts a client gets when subscribing to several services at a time) using a built-in discount mechanism, and customers will be able to create their own combined price plans.