Pricing/billing-related guidelines

This doc explains required styles and recommended phrasings for pricing-related requirements.

Explanations of philosophy

If you haven't already, please read Overview of pricing plans to understand our two different pricing plans, as it helps understand our pricing language guidelines.

We should attempt to minimize reference to pricing and billing impacts in the docs, with these two main exceptions:

• We put a good amount of pricing and billing detail in the pricing/billing-related docs.
• When a feature requires a pricing edition (Standard, Pro, Enterprise), we should place that in the requirements of a feature's doc. Learn more about documenting pricing edition.

Here are some reasons behind this philosophy of minimizing pricing-related docs mentions:

New Relic One pricing plan

For the New Relic One pricing plan, there are several pricing factors involved. As a general approach, the only pricing factor we document is that related to the editions (Standard, Pro, and Enterprise).

This is because the New Relic platform is much more open on the New Relic One pricing plan. The user type (basic user versus full user) or roles/capability limitations are the main factors in gating platform functionality. And in those cases, it should usually be fairly obvious (via UI upsells, or general knowledge that product gating is often due to roles/permissions) why things are off-limits.

Pro and Enterprise editions

The main exception to New Relic One pricing factors is for features provided by Pro and Enterprise editions; for example:

• Admin functionalities like SAML SSO set up, or the ability to create custom user roles
• More synthetic monitor checks
• Increased data retention periods

Because there are only a few things in the Pro and Enterprise editions, this should be an infrequent need.

Guidelines for mentioning pricing edition

When you document a pricing edition-related restriction, use the following approach:

• Requirements section: When documenting features that require the Pro or Enterprise edition, add edition requirements in a "requirements" section of the doc, with wording like: "This requires Pro or Enterprise edition." Only add pricing-related wording for the specific features that Pro and Enterprise edition give access to; this is a fairly small set of features.
• Pricing requirements in one section: As a general rule, attempt to place any pricing edition requirement in a single location and avoid putting it in multiple paragraphs.
• Original pricing plan: At this point, only add edition-related requirements for the New Relic One pricing plan editions, not original pricing plan editions. The original pricing plan will be more and more de-emphasized over time, as more customers get on the new pricing plan, so there shouldn't be much need to mention original pricing aspects or edit those docs.