How to display complex pricing in a friendly way

I'm launching an online service which is designed to bring together a lot of different services into one package, all manageable online.

The problem I've got is how to handle the pricing. The price structure is as follows:

• Service A is a service which runs for a month, it is priced at one of 4 price points depending on how many resources are required. In addition, there are two optional extras which can be added on for a fixed monthly fee.
• Service B & C are services with a fixed monthly fee, and then a 'per unit' cost.
• Service D just has a fixed monthly cost
• Service E (which is storage which underlies all the other services) is priced per GB.

Any monthly fees (including add-ons) are invoiced monthly in advance, and usage is deducted from a pre-paid deposit balance.

Are there any 'best practices' for this kind of thing? Would I just be better putting together packages which include all the services (at varying levels)?

The closest example I can think of would be cable services - e.g offering television, phone and broadband with varying levels of packages and some parts of the service billed in arrears based on actual usage.

If your business model is to bring all of these services together into one package, then you're going to have to come up with a unified pricing plan.

I'm not sure that this happens so often that there's a "best practice" here, but in general you should stay away from complicated pricing.

I don't recall seeing any successful B2B start up with a pricing plan based on more than one attribute. I've seen tiered pricing, consumption pricing, etc.

On a more general note, however, nobody's going to use your service if they can't reasonably predict how much they're going to have to pay, and as a potential customer, your pricing strategy above is way over the line.

A "dynamic pricing table" on top of the regular one could improve the overall understanding of the packages.

An HTML/JavaScript form with multiple choice questions corresponding to the services and sub-services you offer with "real-time" price adjusting seems to me the better way to guide the client.
That way he can "play" with the system and get a better picture of the price/services balance.

I've dealt with many b2b companies with non-simple pricing schemes... Usually email service providers that can have both flat monthly tiers and per-email tiers. Then they then offer other options such as archiving (per GB), static IP addresses (per server), etc.

I think the key is to make things as simple as possible for 80% of your customer base while allowing more complex customers some flexibility. This could come in the form of pre-packing the most popular combinations of your services.

Example:
WPEngine's pricing certainly 'seems' simple enough, but if you look deeper, there are lots of options. Some options are even hidden such as the fact that they'll tack one 1 more installation to a plan for $15/mo (I think).

http://wpengine.com/pricing For 'complex' customers, a dead-easy cost calculator could help. Make it obvious with messaging such as "don't see exactly what you need, build your own custom plan here"