— Chargebee provides some components for self-serve pricing pages, checkout flows and a customer billing portal. But these are all designed around the idea that a customer will subscribe to just one plan. And in Chargebee one plan = one price. So hybrid pricing plans with multiple prices per plan breaks this model. It means that the Chargebee out-of-the-box components for self-serve cannot be used when modeling hybrid plans with the workaround of a base plan plus add-ons. Customers could simply deselect add-ons from their subscription and cause chaos.

This means that you would need to ask your Engineering teams to engineer handbuilt self-serve checkout and billing portal front-end and back-end logic, calling the Chargebee APIs in the background to create the multiple workaround subscriptions. And the complexity only gets worse when you need to support self-serve plan upgrade scenarios.

— When quoting a deal in Chargebee for a customer needing a hybrid pricing plan the salesperson needs to remember to select the correct base plan plus all the add-ons. If they forget one of the required elements there are no guardrails. Incorrect quotes like this can go out to customers and get accepted by them. The error might only be seen at the time of activation, or after multiple billing cycles have completed.

Unwinding from such egg-on-face unforced errors requires lots of apologies to customers, plus lots of costly manual work in your back-office to recalculate invoice adjustments to true-up customer accounts.

— Your teams will no longer see that a customer is subscribed to a single plan like “Premium Edition” with all revenue neatly grouped under that plan. Instead, they will see that the customer has a base plan plus a bunch of independent add-ons. Each with their own revenue buckets.

When a customer upgrades or downgrades the expansion or contraction MRR does not go from one single plan to another cleanly, but rather from one set of base + addon plans to another set. It can get very messy.