Rewards and Prepaid credits

When building usage-based pricing plans in Amberflo, it is important to understand the distinction between rewards and prepaid credits.

We have written about prepaid credits in detail here. Prepaid credits are assigned at the customer level, and are not associated with any particular meter. The customer uses the product as normal, and the invoice is generated in real time based on this usage throughout the billing cycle. The prepaid credits balance is subtracted from the subtotal on the invoice. The difference (if it is greater than $0) is the amount due to be paid by the customer; if this difference is less than zero (i.e. total is -$150) then that amount is the remaining prepaid credits balance.

On the invoice in the image above, $1000 of free credits are applied to the subtotal of $6,794.03. Therefore, the total the customer will be charged is $5,794.03.

Rewards differ from prepaid credits in that they are applied at the individual meter level. Rewards can be set up such that each meter event or group/block of meter events earns the user a certain reward, in dollars. These rewards are applied to the user’s prepaid credits balance as they are earned. In turn, these prepaid credits are applied to the invoice as described above. Users can define expiration terms after a certain period of time or amount of rewards earned.

In the image above, the reward is set such that for every 5 API calls that are ingested to Amberflo, users with the reward activated will earn $1 to their prepaid credits balance. In this case, there is no expiration date or reward limit applied.