Creating a Brick
What’s a Brick?
Bricks are a crucial part of your pricing and packaging structure. They are the lowest-level data point within a SaaS transaction where pricing is assigned.
You can think of a brick as a line-item SKU on your transaction.
When checking out at the store, your receipt will have several lines (especially if you’re like me and can’t stop grabbing things you don’t really need). Each line item (block of cream cheese, pellet grill, smart-controlled heated socks, etc) represents a SKU (stock keeping unit).
Just as the name denotes, these are items that you are interested in keeping track of in your SaaS inventory.
How to Create a Brick
Take me there
Navigate to Bricks and click New brick.
Fill out your Brick details.
Schedule
Subscriptions, one-time, and usage (oh my!)
Use the guide below to determine which pricing schedule to select.
Make sure to get it right the first time, as this cannot be edited after your brick is saved (more on that in a minute).
Subscription
Use the Subscription payment schedule type any time your customers agree to make a recurring payment in exchange for ongoing access to the Brick.
For example, you may set up your schedule so that users agree to pay for a license to your platform for 12 months.
One-time
One-time payment schedules are used for non-recurring purchases, such as implementation fees or service hours for services outlined in a statement of work.
Usage
Usage pricing denotes billing in arrears for software or services consumed, or allowing your clients to pay-as-you-go.
Note that Usage Bricks require additional integration for your platform to send usage data to Salesbricks. For usage, you will be presented with two measurement options: final value and prorated.
Final value
Uses a running counter that tallies up total usage over a billing cycle (generally, per month)
Prorated
Uses a running counter that tallies up usage over a period of time over a billing cycle (generally, per month)
Some pricing options are dependent on the Brick pricing schedule
Whenever you create a Brick, either Subscription, One-time, Usage, or Milestone is set for the Brick schedule.
Selecting the correct Brick schedule will impact the options available when setting the pricing on the Brick within the Plan.
For example, if Usage is selected you will have the option to input a pay-as-you-go and pre-committed rate, which can be in fractional cents (not available for Subscription nor One-time purchase schedules).
Why is the Brick framework so important?
Just like when building a brick house (like The Commodores?), your Bricks need to have structure and a framework. The Salesbricks Brick framework restricts SKU proliferation - when an organization creates a new underlying SKU each time an item needs to be sold at a different price point or schedule.
A brick can belong to one or many Products and Plans, as depicted below.
Brick pricing is decoupled from from the Brick creation process, and applied when only when adding a Brick to a Plan. This enables your company with the flexibility to innovate on pricing structures, while still allowing those price variations to be tied back to a singular Brick unit.
Without the the Brick framework, obtaining SKU/Brick data for a single Brick across all customers and price variations be a Herculean effort.
With Salesbricks, this data is only a few clicks away.