How to associate meters with product items for use in multiple pricing plans

You can include one Product Item (thought of as a SKU or line item on an invoice) as a component of multiple Pricing Plans - in each plan you can set a different rate or pricing model for that Product Item as needed.

A single meter cannot be associated with multiple product items. Each product item must be associated with one unique meter.

To understand why this is, it is important to understand the relationship between the metering and billing services in Amberflo. They are decoupled services which are responsible for different tasks - Metering Cloud tracks and aggregates usage, Billing Cloud is responsible for rating, billing, and invoicing.

To integrate the two services, the connection point is an object called Product Items. Product items are each associated with one unique meter. The meter provides the usage data and the product item is the object that rates are defined and applied for billing. This connection is needed to a new object (product item) because this new object is the one that will be rated (not the meter). Rating (you set the price) at the product item level, not the meter level.

Therefore, a single meter can serve (connect) to a single product item. But the same product item can be included in different (multiple) pricing plans AND rated (priced) differently.

There are cases where you may need to apply additional logic to set the price of some product item based on a custom dimension. For example, charging a different rate per message depending on the country of the recipient, or charging for storage based on cloud provider and region. Rather than creating individual meters for each country, we recommend you create a single meter and use dimensions when defining and sending meters to track the recipients' countries. When setting the price per message, you can price 'By Dimension' and set unique rates for each country.

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