Reserved Instances & Orders

reservation based pricing in amberflo amberflo supports reservation based pricing, allowing your customers to reserve services for a fixed number of billing periods or until they cancel this model is similar to amazon ec2 reserved instances and is well suited for scenarios where customers commit to a predictable level of usage over time creating reservation products to set up reservation products in amberflo select the rate model when creating a pricing plan, choose the reserved instances with overages rate model select the meter after choosing the rate model, select the meter that corresponds to the resource you want to offer as a reservation product reservation prices and overages once you’ve selected your meter, proceed to define the pricing for reservation products you can declare prices using either per unit or dimensions these prices represent the recurring fee that the customer will pay each billing period for reserving the resource for example, if a customer reserves one server instance, they will pay the defined reservation price every billing cycle to retain access to that instance overage rates overages apply when a customer uses more than what they have reserved define the hourly overage rate that will be charged for any additional usage beyond the reservation example if a customer reserves 3 server instances but uses a 4th instance for a full day, the overage charge will be calculated as hourly overage rate × 24 hours advanced settings for reservation products amberflo provides several advanced settings to give you greater control over how reservation products are billed and managed 1\ billing schedule by default, reservation fees are charged at the beginning of each billing period however, you can configure the billing schedule to charge customers at the end of the billing period instead, depending on your preferred accounting or cash flow practices 2\ proration rules proration rules determine how reservation fees are handled when a customer begins their subscription partway through a billing period for example , if your billing period follows the calendar month and a customer starts a subscription on the 15th, you have two options charge the full monthly fee regardless of the start date prorate the charge based on the number of days remaining in the billing period in this example, the customer would be charged only for the final 15 days of the month these settings allow you to align billing behavior with your business policies while maintaining fairness and transparency for your customers reservation orders once you’ve configured and activated a pricing plan using the reserved instances with overages rate model, your customers can begin placing reservation orders step 1 access the orders tab to place a reservation navigate to the page for the specific customer click on the orders tab if the customer is on a pricing plan that includes reservation products, the tab will display the available products they can reserve click create order on the product you’d like to reserve to begin the order flow step 2 set the expiry date each reservation requires an expiry date you can configure reservations to last for a specific number of billing periods or to continue indefinitely until canceled step 3 add items to the order the order items table summarizes the products being reserved to add a new item click add item to open the drawer enter the quantity choose whether to assign a specific resource id understanding resource id behavior this setting controls whether the reservation is for a general resource or a specific one without a specific resource id with a specific resource id step 4 choose rate configuration next, specify the rate configuration if the pricing plan uses a dimensions rate model, you will need to select the dimension combination (e g size, region) for the reservation if it uses a per unit rate, only one option will be available you’ll see the final price calculated based on your selections if needed, you can override this value before saving click save to add the item to the order step 5 set the start date finally, choose the start date for the reservation if the selected date falls in the middle of a billing period, the first charge may be prorated depending on your pricing plan’s settings once everything is configured, click save to create the reservation order for the customer reviewing active reservation orders you can monitor each customer’s reservation usage by visiting the orders tab on their customer page this view provides a clear breakdown of the reserved limit for each service the actual usage over time the usage graph visually compares what was reserved versus what was consumed if a customer exceeds their reserved limits—for example, if they reserved 3 server instances but used 4 on a particular day—amberflo will automatically apply the overage rates defined in your pricing plan these overage charges are calculated and added to the customer’s invoice at the end of the billing period, ensuring accurate and transparent billing for any excess usage