Vantage Launches Re-Rating to Public Pricing for MSP Managed Accounts

Today, Vantage is launching support for Service Re-rating to Public Pricing for MSP Managed Accounts. Vantage Managed Service Provider (MSP) customers can now choose to represent select services’ usage or all usage for their managed customers as public prices, removing enterprise discounts or private pricing.

Creating a billing rule to re-rate services to public price in a managed account

MSPs are often able to negotiate substantially higher Enterprise Discount Plans (EDPs) or Private Pricing Agreements (PPAs) from cloud providers based on the aggregate amount of usage across all of their customer base than what those customers would get if they were to purchase directly from a cloud provider. To create margins for the services the MSP provides, they will often revert their customers’ pricing back to list price and keep the difference between their discounted price and cloud provider public pricing. Re-billing manually can be extremely complex since it requires recalculating every billing line item from the cloud provider, often totaling millions or billions of rows per month.

Now, with the launch of Re-rating to Public Pricing for MSP Managed Accounts, Vantage customers can automate the repricing of individual billing line items. This allows their end customers to create plots of their costs that accurately reflect how they will be billed. MSPs can create Public Price billing rules in MSP Settings by selecting services to re-price at list price and applying the rule to customers’ Managed Accounts. Users who view the parent Management Account will still see the cost that is billed by AWS to enable margin comparisons for end customers.

Service Re-rating to Public Pricing for MSP Managed Accounts is now enabled for all MSP Vantage accounts. To learn more, see the product documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being launched today?

Vantage is launching Service Re-rating to Public Pricing for MSP Managed Accounts, enabling MSPs to reset customer usage to the cloud provider’s list price, excluding Enterprise Discounts or Private Pricing.

2. Who is the customer?

Any Vantage customer that is provisioned as an MSP account can use Service Re-rating to Public Pricing.

3. How much does this cost?

There is no additional cost for using Service Re-rating to Public Pricing for MSP Managed Accounts.

4. How do I set up Service Re-rating to Public Pricing?

To set up Service Re-rating to Public Pricing for MSP Managed Accounts, navigate to the “Billing Rules” section of Partner Settings within the Settings page. Select “New Billing Rule” and then “Adjustment” to initiate creating a new Billing Rule. After giving the rule a name, select “Re-rate to Public Price”, and save the Billing Rule.

To apply this rule to Managed Accounts, under the “Managed Accounts” section of Partner Settings, select each account you would like to apply your billing rule to, and select “Assign a Billing Rule”, and then chose the billing rule you just created. Billing rules can also be assigned to Managed Accounts programmatically using the /managed_accounts/{managed_account_token} API.

5. What does the end customer see for usage that has been re-rated?

When a user views a Managed Account with services re-priced to list price, whether through direct authentication or masquerading, usage appears at list price without any indication of a price change.

6. What do users see in the parent account?

In the parent account, users will see the AWS-billed price, and the billing rule will not apply. This enables margin analysis and understanding of where these commitments are applied.

7. Which cloud providers are supported?

At this time, only AWS is supported for Service Re-rating to Public Pricing.

8. How are public prices calculated?

When the Re-rating to Public Pricing Billing rule is applied, Vantage will re-map costs from lineItem/UnblendedCost to pricing/publicOnDemandCost from the AWS Cost and Usage Report.

9. How are billing rules evaluated?

Billing rules are evaluated in priority order based on the order they are listed on a Managed Account’s billing rules page. If you want to apply further billing rules after re-rating to public price, additional billing rules must be listed after and Re-rating to Public Pricing billing rules.

10. Once I create a re-rating rule and assign it to a Managed Account, how long does it take for the Managed Account to have the costs represented?

Re-processing of the data for the relevant accounts begins immediately. Depending on the scale of the data in the account, it will take variable amounts of time, but usually completes within 30 minutes from applying the rule.