Introduction to pricing
With 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.
Privileges: Access Pricing view, Manage pricing
For each datacenter, you can set separate prices, and use different currencies, and you can set cost codes for resources, such as VM image templates.
The workflow to create a new pricing model is as follows:
Enter currencies
Create cost codes
Create the pricing model
Assign the model to an enterprise
Pricing is available in the Abiquo API. See CurrenciesResource, CostCodesResource, PricingTemplatesResource, EnterprisesResource
Display pricing models
To display pricing models, click the pricing button in the main menu. The pricing model of your enterprise has the text "(assigned pricing model)" after the Name.
The platform will list the pricing models that you can display based on your user scope.
To display the details of this pricing model, select it from the list, and click the pencil edit button.
You can only make changes to a pricing model if you have the same scope as the pricing model. The scope of the pricing model is the user scope of the creator of the pricing model.
Create a new currency
The platform supports multiple currencies.
Default currencies are euros, US dollars, and Japanese yen
You cannot delete a currency that is in use
You must always have at least one currency
Each pricing model uses only one currency
To add a new currency
Go to Pricing → Currencies
Click the + add button
Complete the dialog
The currency Code will display in pricing. Download code information from the ISO website or refer to Wikipedia
The Name of the currency must be unique and it can include the currency symbol
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.
Click Save
Create a new cost code
You can use cost codes to set prices for resources or services, such as VM templates and hardware profiles. A pricing estimate for a virtual appliance will include cost of the cost code. The platform can also account and bill the usage of resources with cost codes.
To create a cost code for resource pricing:
Go to Pricing → Cost codes
Click the + add button
For General information:
Enter a Name to identify the cost code. You can use the Name and Description to identify the cost item to make it easier for your users to understand their cloud bill
Select the Type that is the resource type the cost code will apply to.
The Custom service option is not implemented in Abiquo 6.0.1.Select the Unit for the cost code:
The Subscription option is not implemented in Abiquo 6.0.1 Usage CPUs will record the usage and multiply by the number of CPUs in a VM with the cost code
Usage user licenses for a template will record the usage and multiply by the number of licenses you enter when you add the cost code to a VM
For Initial prices
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.
Now assign cost codes to VM templates (see Modify a VM template) and hardware profiles (see Hardware profiles). Then set prices for the cost codes in your pricing models. You can also assign cost codes to VMs, see Administer and troubleshoot VMs.
Note that you can override cost code prices 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.
Create a new pricing model
See Create a new pricing model
Display 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
Screenshot: A sample pricing message
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".
Configure 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:
Edit the message, change the text and use the standard cut and paste keys to change the location of the variables.
You can also select variables to add to this message from the pull-down list. Align the message with your accounting system.
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: |
%VDC_PRICES% | List of charges per virtual datacenter resource |
%VDC_TOTAL_CHARGE | Total charge for virtual datacenter resources, not including VMs |
Assign pricing models to enterprises
After you save a pricing model, to assign it to one or more tenants, do these steps:Go to Pricing→ Pricing models
Click Enterprise associations
In the search boxes at the top of the enterprise lists, enter text from the enterprise name to filter and display the enteprise
Select the pricing model
The enterprise with the pricing model will move to the enterprises With pricing model panel.
Troubleshooting: If an expected pricing model does not display in the list, check that you are logged in with a user with the same scope as the user that created the pricing model.
You can also assign a pricing model to an enterprise when you edit the enterprise. See Set a pricing model for a tenant in Manage enterprises.
Create reseller pricing models
Abiquo supports reseller pricing with pricing scope and default base prices per datacenter.
This feature is especially useful for private cloud pricing estimates and you can use it with private cloud usage data to display billing dashboards.
For public cloud reseller accounts, you can import price lists for hardware profiles into pricing models. Administrators can display the pricing model to view public cloud price lists.
To implement reseller pricing:
The reseller scope cannot be the unlimited global scope
Create pricing models with the base prices that resellers will pay for virtual resources
Assign a pricing model to each reseller enterprise
For details of how to create pricing models and assign them to customers, see Pricing view
To use reseller pricing:
Log in as the reseller administrator
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
Optionally create cost codes for reseller services. For more details, see Pricing view
To create customer pricing models, click the copy button to clone the reseller pricing model
Change the pricing model as required
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)
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.
For Hardware profiles you can onboard and synchronize the price lists of public cloud providers. See Synchronize public cloud price lists
Go to Cost code prices and optionally set prices for this tenant for reseller services
Save the pricing model
Assign the pricing model to customers. Each customer administrator should only be able to display the pricing model for their own tenant.
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