Pricing view

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. 

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:

1. Enter currencies

2. Create cost codes

3. Create the pricing model

4. Assign the model to an enterprise

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

1. Go to Pricing → Currencies

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 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:

1. Go to Pricing  → Cost codes

2. Click the + add button

3. For General information:

   1. 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

   2. 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.

   3. Select the Unit for the cost code:
      The Subscription option is not implemented in Abiquo 6.0.1

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

      2. 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

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.

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

To assign prices to resources for enterprises, create pricing models with prices for VM elements.

Before you begin:

• Add your currencies at Pricing → Currencies

• Pre-create cost codes at Pricing → Cost codes to assign to resources, for example, hardware profiles or templates

To create a pricing model: 

1. Go to Pricing → Pricing models

2. To create a new pricing model when there is none assigned to your enterprise, click +add; or
   To clone a pricing model, click the copy clone button. The platform will name the new model "PricingModelName (c)".
   Note: The platform will assign your user scope to the pricing model and only users with the same scope can edit the pricing model

   

Prices

You can enter general prices for datacenter resources.

Resource prices table

The provider can configure billing by usage or allocation.

Datastore tiers

You can set prices for datastore tiers.

In a private cloud datacenter, datastore tiers set service levels for storage. See Manage datastore service levels with datastore tiers.

Persistent storage

In private cloud, you can set prices for the persistent storage tiers. In public cloud regions, the platform automatically imports the storage tiers from the providers so you can price them.

Hardware profiles

You can price hardware profiles in public cloud and in private cloud datacenters with hardware profiles, see Hardware profiles.

The platform can retrieve hardware profile costs from AWS and Azure. See Import hardware profile prices from AWS

In private cloud and VCD, you can also use cost codes for hardware profile pricing. Pricing and billing of dynamic hardware profiles also includes the usage cost of CPU and RAM.

Backup prices

In private cloud datacenters and VCD public cloud regions, you can set prices for backup policies.

When users request a pricing estimate for their virtual appliance, the platform will include the price of the backup policies of each VM.

The platform will also include the price of backup services in the VM_PRICES list.

The platform bills backups with a monthly fixed cost and/or a separate cost for VM disk size in GB (in the platform). For example, if a customer has a VM with 50 GB of hard disk and is using a daily backup policy. If the price for the backup policy is $20 and the price per GB is $1 per GB, the customer will pay $20 + (50 * $1) = $70 per month.

Cost code prices

This tab displays resources and cost codes with their initial prices. You can modify these prices in this new pricing model. The platform will display a warning symbol if you enter a discount of the price in the current pricing model.

Troubleshooting

Access to pricing models

• When you create a pricing model, Abiquo automatically assigns the same scope as your user. The Abiquo UI does not display the scope of the pricing model

• Users with pricing privileges can always display the pricing model of their own enterprise. Administrators who can switch to another enterprise can display the current pricing model of the enterprise, even if the pricing model has a different scope

• To display or manage the pricing model of another enterprise in Pricing view, you must have the same scope as the creator of the 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:

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.

Assign pricing models to enterprises

After you save a pricing model, to assign it to one or more tenants, do these steps:

1. Go to Pricing→ Pricing models

2. Click Enterprise associations

   

3. In the search boxes at the top of the enterprise lists, enter text from the enterprise name to filter and display the enteprise

4. 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 Assign a pricing model to an enterprise

Create reseller pricing models

Abiquo supports reseller pricing with pricing scope and default base prices per datacenter.

To implement reseller pricing:

1. The reseller scope cannot be the unlimited global scope

2. Create pricing models with the base prices that resellers will pay for virtual resources

3. 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:

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 cost codes for reseller services. For more details, see Pricing view

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)

      

   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.

      

   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 Cost code prices 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.

Related pages

• Abiquo accounting services integration

• Abiquo billing integration