Vantage Launches Re-Rating Tiered Discounts for MSP Managed Accounts

Today, Vantage is launching support for Re-Rating Tiered Discounts for MSP Managed Accounts. Vantage for Managed Service Provider (MSP) customers can now re-calculate tiered pricing at a customer level, re-creating the pricing model customers would receive purchasing directly from a cloud provider, as well as removing free tier usage from newly created accounts.

Creating a Re-Rating Tiered Discounts Billing Rule

MSPs benefit from tier-based pricing models of cloud services, such as Amazon S3 and CloudFront, through the aggregation of usage across all the customers they manage. This results in the pricing of end customers’ usage at discounted pricing tiers, which would not be achievable by that customer purchasing directly from the cloud provider. To create margins for the services the MSP provides, they will often re-implement the tiers of pricing the customer would have achieved based on just their usage and keep the difference between their discounted price and cloud provider public pricing. Manual calculation of these tiers needs to be done for every service with tiered pricing for every customer, every month, resulting in intensive and error-prone calculations.

Now, with the launch of Re-Rating Tiered Discounts for MSP Managed Accounts, Vantage for MSP customers can automate the calculation of pricing tiers for each end customer, and have their usage accurately reflect their own tiered pricing in real time. MSPs can create Re-Tiering billing rules, in the Billing Rules section of Settings, and apply the billing rule to customers’ Managed Accounts. Users viewing the parent Management Account will still see the cost that is billed by AWS to enable margin comparisons for end customers.

Re-Rating Tiered Discounts for MSP Managed Accounts is now enabled for all Vantage for MSPs accounts. To learn more, see the product documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being launched today?

Vantage is launching the ability to control distribution of tiered discounts and free tier usage for MSPs, which allows MSPs to re-tier the usage of their customers according to the pricing tiers from cloud providers.

2. Who is the customer?

Any Vantage customer that is provisioned as an MSP account can use Re-Rating Tiered Discounts for MSP Managed Accounts.

3. How much does this cost?

There is no additional cost for using Re-Rating Tiered Discounts for MSP Managed Accounts.

4. How do I set up a billing rule to Re-Rate Tiered Discounts?

To set up Re-rating Tiered Discounts 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 Tiered Discounts”, 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. Which services and tiers does this rule apply to?

Removal of tiered discounts:

• Amazon S3
• Amazon CloudFront

Removal of free tier:

• There are various services that fall under AWS’s free tier, such as EC2 (t2.micro and t3.micro), RDS (750 hrs per month), S3 (5 GB per month), and more. For a full list of services, see the AWS documentation.

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

When in a Managed Account that has services re-priced to list price, whether through direct authentication or masquerading, usage of services that are included in the billing rule will be presented at list price, with no indication that any price change was made on that usage.

7. What do users see in the parent Management Account?

When viewing the parent Management Account, users will still see the price billed by AWS reflected, and the billing rule will not be applied. This enables margin analysis and understanding of where these commitments are applied.

8. Which cloud providers are supported?

At this time, only AWS is supported for Re-Rating Tiered Discounts for MSP Managed Accounts.

9. Can I aggregate usage across multiple end customer accounts?

Usage is aggregated across MSP Managed Accounts that fall under the same AWS payer account.