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Excerpt
hiddentrue

Abiquo has a flexible pricing system that is designed to enable cloud providers to supply estimates for and price cloud services.

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Introduction to pricing

With Abiquo Pricing, you can create pricing models to match service level agreements and assign them to your tenants and resellers. You can also onboard price lists from public cloud providers with pricing credentials and incorporate them into pricing models. Customers can obtain estimates for their virtual appliances from the pricing system. The platform's accounting system meters the resource usage of each tenant. The platform's billing system enables you to charge customers for all their cloud usage with one bill based on pricing and accounting. The platform also enables reseller pricing within a tenant hierarchy. 

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The workflow to create a new pricing model is as follows:

  1. Enter currencies

  2. Create extra charges with cost codes for extra chargesand assign them

  3. Create price factors for providers and resellers

  4. Create the pricing model

  5. Assign the model to an enterprise or reseller

Tip

Pricing is available in the Abiquo API. See CurrenciesResource, CostCodesResource, PricingTemplatesResource, EnterprisesResource

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  1. Go to PricingCurrencies

  2. Click the + add button

  3. Complete the dialog

    1. The currency Code will display in pricing. Download code information from the ISO website or refer to Wikipedia

    2. The Name of the currency must be unique and it can include the currency symbol

    3. For Digits, enter the number of digits after the decimal point. If you change the pricing model from a currency with more digits to one with fewer digits, then the platform will round prices up to the nearest digit.

  4. Click Save

    Create a new currency

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Create

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extra charges with cost codes

You can use cost codes set prices for extra charges to set prices with cost codes for resources or services, such as VM templates and hardware profiles. 
A pricing estimate for a virtual appliance will include the extra charges.
The platform can also account and bill the usage of resources with cost codes for extra charges.

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  1. Go to Pricing  → Extra charges with cost codes

  2. Click the + add button

  3. For General information:

    1. Enter a Name to identify the cost code for extra charges.
      You can use the Name and Description to identify the cost item to make it easier for your users to understand their cloud bill

    2. Select the Type that is the resource type the extra charge will apply to.

      1. To bill an enterprise directly for a service or subscription or product, select Enterprise product.


      (warning)

      1. You can assign this cost code directly to an enterprise, see Manage enterprise products

      2. The Custom service option is

      not implemented yet
      1. implemented in customer integrations only in this version.

    3. Select the Unit for the extra charge:(warning) The Subscription option is not implemented yet

      1. Usage CPUs will record the usage and multiply by the number of CPUs in a VM with the extra charge

      2. Usage user licenses for a template will record the usage and multiply by the number of licenses you enter when you add the extra charge to a VM

      3. The Subscription option is available for Enterprise products and custom services in customer integrations

  4. For Initial prices

    1. The initial prices for a resource are set now in all of the currencies in your platform. You can later assign different prices in each pricing model.

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For full details of working with cost codes for extra charges, see Multiple Manage extra charges with cost codes.

You can assign cost codes for extra charges to VM templates (see Modify a VM template) and hardware profiles (see Hardware profiles).
Then set prices for the cost codes for extra charges in your pricing models.
You can also assign cost codes for extra charges to VMs, see VM cost codes and Administer and troubleshoot VMs.

Note that you can override extra charges for hardware profiles by setting prices for specific hardware profiles.
Pricing and billing for dynamic hardware profiles will also use prices for CPU and RAM for the datacenter.

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Create price factors for providers

See Manage price factors

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Create a new pricing model

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Excerpt
nameDisplay a pricing estimate message

To display pricing estimates, assign a pricing model to the enterprise. The platform will display the estimates as follows:

  •  At any time users can click the Estimate button in the virtual appliance view to display a current pricing estimate for a VM. 

    Screenshot: Pricing estimate button with EUR price code

    Virtual machines in virtual datacenter virtual appliance view

    Screenshot: A sample pricing message

    Deploy charges
  • Users with access to the Abiquo API can also request a pricing estimate via the API.

  • To automatically display a pricing estimate popup when the user deploys a virtual appliance or VM, when creating a pricing model, select the checkbox to "Show charges before deployment".

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Configure the pricing estimate message

Excerpt
nameConfigure the pricing estimate message

The default text of the pricing estimate message is as follows.

The charge for this Virtual Appliance will be %CHARGE_FORMATTED% per %CHARGEPERIOD%, charged per %MINPERIOD%, subject to a minimum charge of %MINCHARGE_FORMATTED%. Backup service charge: %BACKUP_PRICE%. VMs in this Virtual Appliance will be:
%VM_PRICES%
Resources defined in the Virtual Datacenter total %VDC_TOTAL_CHARGE% per %CHARGEPERIOD%:
%VDC_PRICES%

Notes about the pricing estimate message:

  • The virtual appliance and VM pricing estimates only include the costs that are directly related to VMs. 

  • The virtual datacenters resources estimate includes other costs such as the network cost, backup costs, and the cost of datastore disks without a datastore tier, such as a cloud-init ISO. 

  • The VDC resources cost also includes public IP addresses because they are billed for the time of reservation, which may be longer than the time they are attached to a VM.

To customize the pricing estimate message:

  1. Edit the message, change the text and use the standard cut and paste keys to change the location of the variables. 

  2. You can also select variables to add to this message from the pull-down list. Align the message with your accounting system.

Pricing estimate messageImage RemovedPricing estimate messageImage Added

Variable

Description and example

%CHARGEPERIOD%

Charging period, for example "month".

%MINCHARGE_FORMATTED%

Minimum charge, for example 2.25 USD.

%MINPERIOD%

Minimum charging period, for example "week"

%BACKUP_PRICE

%CHARGE_FORMATTED%

Charge for the virtual machine, for example "22.50 USD"

%VM_PRICES%

List of charges per virtual machine. for example:
VM1 1.25 USD
VM2 1.00 USD 

%VDC_PRICES%

List of charges per virtual datacenter resource

%VDC_TOTAL_CHARGE

Total charge for virtual datacenter resources, not including VMs

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  1. Log in as the reseller administrator

  2. Go to Pricing view. The reseller pricing model will display. You can edit the pricing model to view the prices but you cannot save changes, unless you have the same scope as the user that created the pricing model

  3. Optionally create extra charges for reseller services

  4. To create customer pricing models, click the copy button to clone the reseller pricing model

  5. Change the pricing model as required

    1. For Change all resource prices, enter a percentatge to increase or decrease the base prices, such as reseller markup.
      For resource prices, the platform applies the percentage change (adding the percentage of the base price the reseller entered to the base price)

      Create a new pricing model - general information
    2. Go to Resource prices. Check the new prices or manually enter a new price for any resource.
      If you enter a price that is lower than the base price, Abiquo will highlight the price with red text.

      Create a new pricing model - resource prices
    3. For Hardware profiles you can onboard and synchronize the price lists of public cloud providers. See Synchronize public cloud price lists

    4. Go to Extra charges and optionally set prices for this tenant for reseller services

    5. Save the pricing model

    6. Assign the pricing model to customers. Each customer administrator should only be able to display the pricing model for their own tenant.

Update a pricing model

Abiquo pricing now stores a history of pricing changes, in order to correctly regenerate billing using historical prices.

By default, Abiquo will use new prices in billing in the next calendar month, but you can manually update pricing and regenerate billing.

See Update pricing and generate billing

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