Amberflo Billing Cloud 

Today, we are announcing the launch of Amberflo Quoting Cloud that streamlines quoting and and usage tracking for cloud services such as Generative AI, LLMs, co-pilots, and modern SaaS.

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Amberflo Quoting Cloud is a modern Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) service, purpose-built for usage-based and hybrid pricing models, that enables sales teams to close deals faster by accurately configuring quotes and tracking usage consumption.

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Quoting Cloud is the latest addition to Amberflo’s leading platform for Metering and Usage-Based Pricing and Billing. It serves as the third leg of the stool (together forming Quoting Cloud, Metering Cloud, and Billing Cloud) to deliver a complete modern platform from quote-to-cash for businesses with next generation, AI/ML based products and services.

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It empowers sales teams to bring in repeatability and predictability into usage-based contracts with flexible discounts and entitlements. It reduces time to close and most importantly drives alignment and accuracy between what is sold and what is subsequently invoiced and billed.

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Traditional Billing solutions were not built for Usage-Based 

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Traditional Quoting or CPQ solutions were not designed for Usage-Based pricing and billing models. They do not support dynamic price calculations based on usage, contract and entitlement terms such as flexible or tiered pricing, prepaid and drawdowns, commitments and true-ups, and more. Additionally, traditional CPQ tools are expensive to use, and difficult to operate, requiring long deployment and change management cycles. They have no built-in capabilities for operationalizing a quote. Usage Metering, Invoicing and Billing are off loaded to a separate 3rd party system or to a manual process, requiring complex, costly, and time consuming integrations with subpar results and continuous remediation issues. 

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Amberflo Billing Cloud solves usage-based pricing and billing

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A usage-based billing system, integrated seamlessly with a usage-based metering and quoting system serves to “operationalize” the quote. 

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It generates on-demand, metered invoicing and billing based on entitlement and terms of the committed contract. If a custom or private offer was put in place, the billing system will need to automatically translate that into a pricing plan, including underlying metering, to track usage and invoice. 

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The final piece in the puzzle with usage metering and price forecasting is a modern billing solution that can accurately invoice and charge each customer based on their usage of the generative AI service. Users should be able to create flexible pricing plans, combining usage-based, seat-based, and fixed-rate elements together as needed. The billing service must leverage the metering service which tracks usage to then apply the rating (pricing) logic in real time to generate metered invoices. Customers and users alike must be able to see the up-to-date invoice balance at any point in a billing cycle to guarantee maximal fairness and total transparency in billing. 

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Key Benefits

• Close deals faster with accurate quoting and approvals 
• Increase revenue while saving costs by eliminating expensive solutions and integrations
• Fast time to deployment. No complex integrations needed
• Rapidly monetize AI/ML based products and features
• Fully automate quote to revenue cycle with realtime usage metrics and insights
• Eliminate remediation issues and increase customer satisfaction

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Key Features

• Deeply integrated and fully interoperable solution for quoting, metering, pricing, and billing
• Common Metering Platform shared across Quoting and Billing
• Full audit trail with a single source of truth from quoting to revenue recognition
• Quote and operationalize any pricing model
• Highly configurable product catalog and quote approval workflows
• Native CRM integration 

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With the launch of Amberflo Quoting Cloud, businesses now have access to an advanced Configure, Price, and Quoting (CPQ) service that simplifies the sales process for those using usage-based pricing models. By combining Quoting Cloud with our existing Metering and Billing Cloud platform, Amberflo enables businesses to fully embrace and optimize usage-based pricing strategies and business models.

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To learn more about Amberflo AI Monetization Platform, click here.

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To learn more about Amberflo Quoting Cloud, click here. 

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To learn more about Amberflo Metering Cloud, click here.

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Blog 2: How to Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) within a Usage-Based Pricing Model

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Summary

CPQ tools are an essential part of sales and monetization, but most aren’t built to serve usage-based or hybrid pricing models. Learn what to look for in a modern CPQ tool that will boost your usage-based pricing initiatives. 

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Introduction

If you’ve worked in a sales environment, you’re familiar with typical CPQ processes. Leading CRM Hubspot defines the role of CPQ tools as:

Configure, Price, Quote software (CPQ) enables sales teams to generate price quotes for orders quickly and accurately. An effective CPQ solution can help businesses streamline their invoicing and payment processes, and can simplify inventory management.

This definition of CPQ has served a traditional seat-based pricing world, however, pricing as we know it is changing. As companies transition to hybrid or usage-based pricing models, the definition of what CPQ is and how it’s done will need to evolve.

Monetization with Usage-Based Pricing

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In addition to quoting, achieving monetization within a usage-based pricing model also includes metering and billing. However, these “three legs of the stool” cannot exist separately from one another. In order to succeed with usage-based pricing, each aspect of monetization must be compatible with each other. Your usage metering must be designed to fuel your billing processes, your billing and pricing must include transparent metering data, and your quoting processes also need to account for the downstream metering and billing processes.

For example, under a usage-based pricing model, CPQ tools must be able to support custom contract and entitlement terms such as flexible or tiered based pricing, prepaid and drawdowns, and commitments with true-ups.

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Quoting for Usage-Based Pricing

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In a usage-based pricing model, the quote is not only an estimate of price, but also an estimate of usage which can go on to serve as a benchmark within the customer relationship. 

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During pre-sales conversations, you will walk a prospect through each metered line item of the quote that will be created. For example, let’s say one of the line items on your quote is “API Calls.” When discussing the prospect’s use case, you come to the determination that they will make around 3,000 API calls per billing cycle. On their quote, they should be able to see the price per individual API call, as well as the total price for the predicted volume of 3,000 API calls. 

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Because you quoted on metered items, you are able to easily compare a customer’s actual usage to their predicted usage. If they are using more than predicted, you can quickly identify them as power users and explore upsell opportunities. If they are using less than predicted, you can mitigate the risk of churn by revisiting their agreement with actual usage data in hand.

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[More complex example]?

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Amberflo Can Help

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Currently, Amberflo’s Quoting Cloud is the only CPQ on the market specifically built to handle the complexities of a usage-based or hybrid pricing model, and empower GTM teams to operationalize quotes by metering usage and generating on-demand, metered invoicing and billing.

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To learn more about Amberflo’s Quoting Cloud and how we can help with usage-based monetization, reach out to us here.

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Blog 3: How to Achieve Predictability with Usage-Based Pricing

Introduction

As the world is only just beginning to adopt usage-based principles in pricing en masse, traditional solutions do not exist that span the full workflow including quoting, metering, and ultimately generating and submitting metered invoices to customers for payment. We are pleased to announce that we’ve added Amberflo Quoting Cloud to our product portfolio, making Amberflo the only company offering an end-to-end usage-based monetization platform. 

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The Predictability Problem

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The biggest criticism against usage-based pricing is a lack of predictability, which has the potential to negatively impact both the business and its customers if not properly managed. This requires businesses to modernize infrastructure to accurately track and aggregate usage in real time. It also requires businesses to provide visibility to customers and prospects into the expected cost of different scenarios (usage amounts). 

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Once a deal is signed and the customer is in flight, this lack of predictability can be addressed with real-time metering and an on-demand Customer Portal (link to webpage about Portal) that provides accurate, real-time data about consumption and the current invoice amount. Alerts can be configured to notify when usage for a particular meter or even the current invoice amount reaches a given threshold. But what about before the deal is signed when a customer wants to approximate the cost of different use cases of a product? 

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In the subscription context, CPQ (configure-price-quote) solutions exist to provide this level of pre-sales visibility into the expected costs and payment schedule, given some basic constraints about the anticipated usage (in a subscription context, this usually includes the number of users and what “premium” features should be included in the entitlement). However in the usage-based world, this became more difficult, as the charge depends not only on the number of users, but on the actual product usage. This of course, requires that the company be able to accurately collect and track product usage data at scale. It is much more difficult to implement and manage a metering service to do that, than it is to simply multiply the number of users by the per-user cost.

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How Amberflo Increases Predictability

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Amberflo Quoting Cloud was created to provide visibility into the anticipated costs. This creates predictability and sets expectations for both parties, with the buyer knowing precisely what their expected usage would cost, and over what schedule. The seller gets detailed visibility into the customer’s use case to better offer its own support and customer success resources, as well as a level of revenue predictability.

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Quoting is Only the Beginning

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Quoting is built to be an additional tool to help businesses succeed with usage-based pricing. In reality, the real work begins after the quote is accepted and a deal is signed. Now, Metering comes into play as the second pillar to accurately track, aggregate, and report on real-time product usage. It is imperative that metering is deployed correctly as the meter data is the foundation for all analytics and billing that occur downstream.

Once metering is set up and actively tracking usage, it is critical to monitor customer progress and track their actual usage against what was estimated during quoting and contract negotiation. There should be practices in place to track progress and intervene if actual usage starts lagging too far below where it should be based on the initial terms. If the customer is confused, blocked, or unsatisfied, having access to real-time meter data allows customer success teams to step in to support before it is too late. 

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Notes:

We need to publish three blogs in January.

Given our announcement, the theme of the month will be Monetization and Quoting. 

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Dan has drafted this blog: Announcing Amberflo Quoting Cloud

So in addition to this one, we need to choose two more.

“How-To” blogs are very good for SEO, I suggest we choose one of these:

How to Quote Within a Usage-Based Pricing Model 

Alternate title -

How to Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) within a Usage-Based Pricing Model

How to Create Predictability with Usage-Based Pricing

How to Operationalize a Usage-Based Quote

How to Create a Quote for Metered Product Items

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“What Is” blogs are also great for SEO, so we could do:

What is a Usage-Based Monetization Platform?

What is Quoting for Usage-based Pricing (or How Does Quoting for Usage-Based Pricing Work)

Other ideas welcome!

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For Jan: 

How to Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) within a Usage-Based Pricing Model

How to Operationalize a Usage-Based Quote

Announcing Amberflo Quoting Cloud