On Amberflo, your customers can subscribe to one or multiple of your products for a set number of billing periods or until canceled. These subscriptions are fixed fees paid either at the beginning or at the end of a billing period.

Creating Subscription Products

To create subscription products, select the Custom pricing plan template. Within the pricing plan, add a Meter Level Rate. From the available rate models, choose Subscription with Overages.

Think of subscription products as resources your customers are leasing from your services. For example, if you are charging your customers on server usage, then you can declare your servers as subscription products, and your customers can subscribe to one or multiple of them for a set number of billing periods or until canceled.

After selecting the rate model, choose your product item to create subscription products from. Note that the product item must be associated with a Continuous type meter to be used as a subscription product. In this example, we will use servers.

Subscription Prices and Overages

Once you choose your product item, you can move on to the next section to declare prices for (1) Subscription Products and (2) Overages. Subscription product prices can be declared as Per Unit or Dimensions. These are the prices for, in this example, one server to be leased by the customer. The customer will pay the declared fixed fee every billing period to own that server resource. Next, in the Overages rates, you will declare what the customer will pay you hourly, if they exceed their subscription limits. Let's say a customer subscribed to 3 servers and used a 4th server for a day. Then their invoice will have the hourly overage price declared multiplied by 24 hours as an overage.

Advanced Settings for Subscription Products

There are three advanced settings you can configure for your subscription products.

The default Billing Schedule for the subscription products is to pay for the fixed charges at the beginning of the billing period. However, you can set the subscription charges to be paid on the last day of the billing period.

The Proration Rules allow you to choose what happens when a customer subscribes to your product in the middle of a billing period. Let's say your pricing plan is on a calendar monthly billing period and the customer started their subscription on the 15th day of the month. You can choose to charge them the full amount for the month, or prorate their usage and only charge the remaining 15 days worth of the fixed subscription charge.

Last but not least, the Cancellation Rules allow you to set if the customer can cancel their subscriptions by themselves or not. If set to allowed, the subscription widgets on the customer portal will have a Cancel button shown on them. The customer can use this button to cancel their order without having to contact you.

Ordering Subscriptions

Once you configure and activate a pricing plan with the instructions above, it's time for your customers to order some subscriptions. To begin, your customers should be on the pricing plan created with a Subscription with Overages product item rate model.

With the two above completed, navigate to a Customer page and click on the Orders tab. If the customer has the correct pricing plan, then this tab will show the subscription products available to the customer. Click on the Create Order button on one of the subscription products to proceed to the order creation flow.

The first thing to set in an order is the expiry date. Your customers can subscribe to your products either for a set number of billing periods or indefinitely (until canceled).

Next, start filling out the Order Items table. This table summarizes the products the customer is subscribing to. Click on Add Item to open the drawer view. Here, the first step is to set the quantity and choose if the customer is subscribing to a specific resource ID or not. Think of this as renting a hotel room vs. buying tickets to a movie. When renting a hotel room, neither you nor the customer know the room number (resource ID) they will be staying in, they just pay for a room with some preferences. However, when purchasing tickets to a movie, the customer "subscribes" to specific seats (resource IDs) and sits on those when they arrive. As such, if you know which resource (in our example, serverID) your customer will lease, then check the Order a Specific Resource ID box. Note that this will fix the quantity to 1, as there can only be one resource associated with a resource ID. If you don't know which resource your customer is subscribing to and would just assign them a resource on the fly, then don't check the box, and type in the quantity they are getting.

Following, select the product that your customer is subscribing to. If the subscription product rates on the pricing plan are configured as a Dimensions rate model, then you will be asked to choose which dimension combination your customer is subscribing to. If it is a Per Unit rate, then you will only have one option to choose from. When done, review the Final Price, and click on Save to add the product to the Order Items table.

When you are done with the Order Items table, set the Start Date. If you choose a date in the middle of a billing period, the first charge of the customer will be prorated or not depending on the pricing plan settings. Click on Save to create the subscription order for the customer when you are done with everything.

Reviewing Active Subscription Orders

As your customers are subscribing to your products, you can review their limits and overages on the Orders tab of the customer page. The graph will show the subscribed limit for each product and the used amounts. If the usage exceeds the subscription limits at any time (for example, the customer ordered 3 servers, but used 4 in a given day), then the Overages rates declared on your pricing plan will be used to charge the customer at the end of the billing period.

Subscription Orders in Commitments

Customers can also subscribe to your products as a part of a commitment. The biggest difference between subscribing to products inside commitment contracts vs. as a standalone order is the payment structure. Subscription orders within commitments will have the customer pay for all billing periods in the commitment term upfront. For example, if the commitment is set for a year and the billing period is calendar monthly, then the customer will pay upfront for the subscription prices multiplied by 12 (the number of billing periods in the commitment term). They will then own those subscriptions throughout their commitment.

Subscription orders in commitments also allow you to change the price charged for these subscriptions. Amberflo will show you the cost of those subscriptions throughout the commitment term, and you will have an option to override them.