How Line Items Determine Your DoPricer Subscription Cost

Here is the short version. For details, skip to Part 2:

Why Your DoPricer Subscription Is Based on Line Items

Part 1: The Short Version

What is a "line item"?

Every time a product is added to a Deal or Quote, that's one line item.

Add three products to a Deal, and you've created three line items. Think of a shop receipt — each row on it, representing one product with its price, is one line item.

Why do line items determine my cost to run DoPricer?

Every time a line item is created, DoPricer must check it — "is there a special price or discount for this line item, or not?" This check must be made every time, even when the answer turns out to be "no, leave the line item price or discount as is."

So you're not paying for the that prices or discounts DoPricer changes for you. You're paying for the checking work it does on every line item, so the right line items are changed and the others are correctly left unchanged.

"But I only have a few products in my product library"

The number of products in your HubSpot Product Library — your list of products — have no bearing on the number of line items to be checked by DoPricer. Products are your database catalog for sales reps to choose from when creeting a deal or quote. DoPricer only gets involved when you a product to a deal or quote. That creates a new Line Item.

In Summary:

• One product added to a Deal or Quote = one new line item.
• DoPricer checks every new line item, whether or not it ends up changing anything.
• The processing effort to check every line item — not the size of your product list, and not your number of users — is what your subscription is paying for.
  
  

Part 2: The Full Explanation of how DoPricer and HubSpot are interacting under the hood

Why does DoPricer charge based number of new line items?

Every single time a line item is created — even one you'd expect DoPricer to leave completely alone — DoPricer has to go and check it. It has to look up:

• What Deal or Quote is this line item on?
• Which company does that Deal or Quote belong to?
• Does that company have special pricing or a discount set up?
• Based on all of that — should this line item's price or discount change, or not?

That checking work happens every time, whether the answer turns out to be "yes, change it" or "no, leave it exactly as it is." DoPricer can't know in advance which line items need changing without first checking all of them — there's no way to only check the "interesting" ones, because until it's checked, it doesn't know which ones are interesting.

So the honest way to think about your subscription is:

You're not paying DoPricer for the prices it changes. You're paying for the checking work it does on every single line item, so that the right ones get changed and the right ones get left alone.

A useful comparison: a shop's checkout scanner still has to scan every single item in your basket — including the ones that turn out to have no discount that day. You wouldn't expect the till to only scan the items on special offer. Same principle here.

Does this include line items on Orders and Invoices too?

Yes — and this is often the part people don't expect. DoPricer only ever changes prices on Deals and Quotes; it doesn't touch Orders, Invoices, Subscriptions, or other objects at all. But it still has to check every new line item created anywhere in your portal, on any object, to work out whether it's one it should act on. That check itself counts toward your usage, even for line items DoPricer was never going to touch in the first place — because HubSpot doesn't tell DoPricer what kind of object a line item belongs to until DoPricer looks it up.

What about when I create a Quote from a Deal — does that cost me twice for the same thing?

As covered in Part 1, creating a Quote from a Deal builds brand new line item records on the Quote, even though the data is identical to what was on the Deal. Each of those new records triggers its own "new line item created" event, exactly the same as if a rep had typed it in from scratch. From HubSpot's point of view, and therefore from DoPricer's point of view, these are new objects that didn't exist a moment ago — so they count toward your subscription usage, just like any other newly created line item.

The good news is that this doesn't mean DoPricer does the full pricing and discount work all over again. It checks the new line item's DoPricer Discount Message property, sees it's already been set (carried over from the original Deal line item), and skips straight past — it won't touch or change anything that's already been priced. But the line item itself is still new, and new line items must be read and checked, which is what your subscription counts.

A simple way to think about it: cloning a line item is like photocopying an order ticket in a kitchen. The copy is identical to the original — same order, same price — but the kitchen still logs it as a new ticket coming through the door, because as far as the till is concerned, a new ticket is a new ticket, whatever's written on it.

Why not just charge per user instead?

Because the number of sales reps in your team has almost nothing to do with how much work DoPricer actually does. Two reps who each create 50 line items a day generate exactly the same amount of checking work as one rep creating 100. What drives DoPricer's workload — and therefore its cost — is how many line items your portal creates, not how many people are creating them.

That's also good news for you: your whole sales team can use DoPricer at no extra cost. Hire five more reps tomorrow and your DoPricer bill doesn't move — only your line item volume does.

What this looks like in cost per line item created:

If your portal creates more line items than your plan covers in a month, the extra ones are charged at $0.05 each — but this is genuinely rare in practice, and your DoPricer settings screen shows your last 6 months of line item volume so you can see well in advance if you're approaching your limit.

The tech details summary:

• DoPricer has to check every line item to decide whether to change its price or discount — including the ones it ultimately leaves alone, and the ones on Orders or Invoices it was never going to touch.
• Creating a Quote from a Deal builds new line item records, so they count as new line items too — even though DoPricer recognises them as already priced and doesn't re-process them.
• Your subscription reflects that checking work, not the number of changes made, the size of your product catalogue, or the number of people on your team.
• More reps, same cost. More products in your library, same cost. More line items, more checking — that's what you're paying for.

For the short version, return to Part 1:

For more help please email support@hubdo.com