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.

Privilege: 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 and click Save

For more details see GUI Create a new currency

Create a new cost code

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 create a cost code for resource pricing

Go to Pricing → Cost codes
Click the + add button
Complete the dialog and initial prices

For more details see GUI Create a new cost code General information

For more details see GUI Create a new cost code Initial prices

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. Note that you can override cost code prices 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:

Go to Pricing → Pricing models
To base the pricing model on your enterprise's current model, click the + add button, 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

For more details see GUI Create a new pricing model General information

Modify prices

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

Backup prices

.

For more details see GUI Create a new pricing model Resource prices Backup policies

Cost code prices

For more details see GUI Create a new pricing model Resource prices Cost code prices

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.
Click here to show/hide the screenshots
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.

For more details see GUI Pricing estimate message variables

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 Assign a pricing model to an enterprise

Create reseller pricing

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

To implement reseller pricing:

Create a scope for each reseller that is not 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

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.
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.

Click here to expand...

After an administrator saves the pricing model they can then assign it to their customers. Each customer administrator should only be able to display the pricing model for their own tenant.
For a guide to pricing for resellers, see Pricing for resellers. See also Synchronize public cloud price lists

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