Usage offer self-service overhaul

New self-service for onboarding usage offers

Pricing

Start by adding and configuring prices of usage components on the new "Usage" tab of your pricing plan:

1. Create meters. You can add multiple meters and give them custom names such as "Data, GB". They will later be displayed to customers in the usage calculator and reports.
2. Set monthly prices. Use all existing pricing tables and formulas to define base prices and how they vary with volume or configurations of other components in the plan.
3. Verify prices. Before saving the plan, check the updated "Preview" page that helps you verify that your usage prices scale exactly as you intended at any usage volume and subscription configuration.

You can freely mix usage, licenses and one-time purchases/fees in one plan - it "just works".

Billing and invoicing

Once the subscription is purchased, it's time to begin to calculate billings for the usage to invoice the customer. If you already calculate invoices yourself, skip this step and contact us to use your invoice data directly.

1. Send data usage to platform via our new Usage API. It will inform the platform how much of each meter customers used over the billing period.
2. Platform will automatically calculate billings based on this data and pricing from your plan. By default, the customer is billed every month based on their total monthly usage. Alternatively, you can bill the customer based on their peak monthly usage (contact us).
3. Invoices will include the calculated usage billings together with other monthly charges.

Usage calculator for sellers and customers

When somebody like a vendor, MSP or telco onboards their usage offer with our new self-service, it now always comes with a built-in usage calculator out of the box. It allows sellers and their customers to enter their estimated usage and project the prices (incl. all partner margins) ahead of time.

Here are two ways you can use it:

1. As a seller, use the calculator on the usage offer you include in the quote. Estimate the total price for your usage-based solution and provide a highly-tailored discount for the deal before you send it to the customer.
2. As a customer (or seller on behalf of the customer), use the calculator when purchasing or updating subscriptions. Ensure that your estimated usage is appropriately budgeted.

In both cases the calculator provides a granular breakdown of prices to help you make great decisions. It shows the prices for:

• Each usage component (e.g., Data, Backup, Compute etc.) separately
• Total monthly usage, with all usage components combined
• Total monthly amount, with all usage and non-usage components combined

Note: some highly-complex usage offers (e.g., Azure Cloud) may not support the new calculator.

Contract onboarding

Acronis partner ID validation

When onboarding your partner and enabling their Acronis contract, you can now validate their partner ID directly with Acronis.

• All you need to do is click "Validate" next to "Partner Tenant ID" under Acronis.
• The platform will verify that the ID and its connection to you are consistent with Acronis.
• This will ensure that subscriptions will be provisioned correctly.

Other

• Azure usage report improvements:
  • Date filter now supports specific date ranges down to a single day. Only applies to usage within last 3 months (grouped by month beyond that).
  • Renamed "Entitlement" column to "Azure Subscription".
  • General performance.
• To verify configuration and calculate the price, pricing plans often rely on external data such as configuration options, account data and more. These are not always relevant to see or interact with as customer. With the latest update, vendors can now choose to hide such fields from customer forms entirely.

These updates went live on Nov 9, 2023.