Commitments

A commitment (contract) is a promise by a customer to spend some configurable amount of money over a specified number of billing cycles, and in return this customer receives a promotion (discount) on the cost of services.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to commitments as they come in many different forms. Amberflo allows you to build custom commitments for each customer. It is important to note that a customer can have only 1 active commitment at a given time.

To create a commitment in Amberflo, select a customer from the Customer view to bring up the overview for that customer. In the ‘Commitments’ section, select ‘Add’. From here, you can begin to configure the commitment:

Choose the associated pricing plan and define the commitment length (the number of billing periods). Next, you have the option to choose how the customer will be billed for the contract.

Payment schedules

If you select Pay in advance, then the customer will be invoiced for the full commitment value and given the corresponding amount in free credits. Usage will then be metered and drawn down against these credits as normal. The credits would carry over across billing periods without expiring as they are valid for the full commitment term. You can choose to add conditions to these credits such as to restrict them to specific product items (or even specific dimension values within product items). You can add multiple such classes of credits using the 'Add Credits' button shown below.

If you select Pay in installments, then you can define the number of installments and the number of credits allocated with each installment (and any conditions applied to these credits as described above).

If you select Pay in arrears with automatic true-up, you only need to specify the total commitment amount (in dollars), and select the True Up checkbox. For the last remaining billing period of the commitment, if the total spend has not yet reached the commitment amount, the remaining amount is added to the final invoice for payment (known as the true up).

Adding Promotions and Ramp Pricing

You can also apply promotions to the commitment at either the pricing plan or product-item level. It is important to note that only one promotion can be applied to a commitment at a time.

To change the discount amount over time, we support the concept of ramps. When selecting a promotion to apply to a commitment, there is a checkbox option 'Apply with ramps'. Selecting this allows you to configure the promotions (discount amount) applied to different ramps and the number of billing cycles each ramp lasts.