Pricing View

Introduction to pricing

With Abiquo pricing, you can create pricing models to match service level agreements and assign them to your tenants and resellers. Customers can obtain estimates for their virtual appliances from the pricing system. Abiquo Accounting meters tenant resource usage and Abiquo billing enables you to charge customers for this usage based on 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. Create your pricing models in Pricing view, after you create and assign any supporting currencies and cost codes. Abiquo controls pricing with scopes as well as privileges to enable reseller pricing.

Click the  icon to access Pricing view. 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

Manage Currencies

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 manage currencies, go to Pricing → Currencies 

Add a new currency

To add a currency, go to Pricing → Currencies.

Manage cost codes

To tag resources such as VM templates and hardware profiles for pricing, use cost codes.  When users in enterprises with a pricing model deploy a VM using a resource with a cost code, the pricing estimate will include the cost assigned to the cost code.

To implement cost code pricing:

1. Before you create a pricing model, go to Pricing → Cost Codes, and create cost codes with initial prices for VM templates and hardware profiles
2. Go to Apps library → Edit VM template → Advanced, and assign cost codes (one per template). See Modify a VM Template
3. Go to Hardware profiles → Create or edit a hardware profile, and assign cost code. See Hardware profiles
4. Go to Pricing → Pricing models. Create a pricing model, and enter the prices per cost code
   1. To override the price of a cost code for a hardware profile in a pricing model, set a resource price for the hardware profile in a datacenter
   2. Dynamic hardware profiles will also use prices for CPU and RAM for the datacenter
      
      

Create a new cost code

To create a cost code for resource pricing, go to Pricing → Cost codes

Manage Pricing Models

To assign prices to resources for enterprises, create pricing models with prices for VM elements. You can clone an existing pricing model to create a new one.  The platform controls access to pricing models with scopes as well as privileges:

• 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

To manage pricing models, go to Pricing → Pricing models. 

Create a new pricing model

Before creating the pricing model:

• To use a new currency, add it at Pricing → Currencies
• To use cost codes for resources, create them at Pricing → Cost codes, and when convenient, assign them to resources, for example, templates in the Apps library view.

Go to Pricing → Pricing models

To clone a pricing model, click the  clone button. The platform will name the new model "PricingModelName (c)".

The platform uses the first pricing model for a location in a currency as the set of base prices for the location. When you create a new pricing model, you can enter a percentage to modify prices. If you then enter a resource price that is lower than the base price, the platform will highlight the price.

Prices

Datastore tiers

Persistent storage

Hardware profiles

Cost code prices

This tab displays resources and cost codes with their prices. 

Create 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. If the user does not have pricing privileges, the platform will display the default '$' dollar symbol or the symbol configured in branding. Or if the user has privileges to retrieve the tenant's pricing model, the platform will display the currency code.

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• 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 message

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

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 VLAN cost, 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.

Assign pricing models to enterprises

To assign a pricing model to an enterprise

1. Go to Pricing → Enterprise Associations. This tab displays a list of pricing models and two panes of enterprises. The default display is all pricing models and all enterprises.

Click on a pricing model to display the enterprises with this pricing model assigned in the left pane and the enterprises without it in the right pane.

• To assign a new pricing model to an enterprise: Select a pricing model from the pull-down list next to an enterprise name to assign the current pricing model to this enterprise.
• To remove a pricing model from an enterprise: Select a new pricing model from the pull-down list next to an enterprise to replace this pricing model OR select "None" to remove this pricing model from an enterprise without replacing it. The enterprise will now move from the left enterprise pane to the right enterprise pane for this pricing model.

You can also assign or remove a pricing model from an enterprise when you create or edit the enterprise. See Manage Enterprises

Create reseller pricing

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

To implement reseller pricing:

1. Create a scope for each reseller that is not 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

When the reseller first opens the Pricing view, their pricing model will display. The administrator can edit this pricing model to view prices but they cannot save changes, unless they have the same scope as the user that assigned the pricing model to the enterprise.

The reseller can then create their own pricing models:

• They can enter a percentage to increase or decrease the base prices.

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• For resource prices, the platform applies the percentage change (adding the percentage of the base price the reseller entered to the base price). 
• The reseller can accept the new prices or manually enter a new price for any resource. If they enter a price that is lower than the base price, Abiquo will highlight the price with red text.