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Amberflo Metering Cloud

Monetize APIs, Platforms, Marketplaces, and more...

A fast and accurate, fully-managed, enterprise-grade Usage Metering Service. Single API to Instrument and Meter any resource in realtime. Learn more here.

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• Ingest meters from Lambda functions
  Meter ingestion from Lambda applications is an increasingly common ask for many customers as serverless application design gains popularity. To get started, first authenticate your account using the API key found in Settings from the UI. Use our Typescript SDK for NodeJS applications and Lambda functions. Import the library from a javascript file with this command:
  const { CustomerDetailsClient } = require('amberflo-metering-typescript');
  
  From there, the SDK will automatically batch and ingest meters to Amberflo asynchronously so as to not interfere with the performance of the application.
  If you don't want to use the SDK, there are other options such as loading meters from the Lambda to other AWS services like S3 or CloudWatch, then ingesting records from there, or manually configuring an ingestion pipeline using the REST API.
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• Meter lifecycle management
  Lifecycle Management of Meters is another feature in addition to idempotency and deduplication in how Amberflo guarantees accuracy of meter events ingestion, count, and aggregation.
  Meters are created in 'Draft' mode where they can be edited and customized completely. To lock a meter to further changes, change its status to 'Active'. Meters in 'Active' mode are locked and can no longer be edited or changed. These meters should be used to track usage and be associated with pricing plans for billing. 
  To take a meter out of service, there is the option to 'deprecate' it. Deprecated meters no longer track usage or can be associated with pricing plans, but are not removed from the system. Meter data from deprecated meters is still saved and accessible to provide full usage history and audit trail. To delete a meter from the system entirely, please reach out to Amberflo Support.
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Amberflo Billing Cloud

Real-time, on-demand Usage-Based Metered Pricing and Billing

Delight customers with flexible Usage-Based Pricing (UBP) and drive the highest levels of revenue growth and product adoption. Learn more here.

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• Flexible free trials
  Build custom free tiers and trials in Amberflo to drive adoption and allow your users to experience your solution's value firsthand. There are several options for trials in Amberflo depending on your product and GTM strategy. Here are some examples:

1. Free trial. To create a free trial, create a pricing plan as normal and assign the plan to a customer. Then, create a Promotion that discounts 100% of the invoice amount at the end of the month. You can make this a one-time promotion for a standard one month free trial or extend it for any length of time.
2. Free credits. Another option is to assign Free Credits to the user; say for example, a free plan includes $300 of free usage before billing kicks in. Initiate a one-time prepaid credits purchase of $300 for the customer and assign them to a standard pricing plan. Create an alert to track the prepaid balance with a webhook to stop the user from taking further action in your app until they sign up for a paid plan or purchase additional credits. As usage occurs, prepaid credits will be drawn-down to cover the invoice amount, and the triggered alert will block their usage once the balance runs out and prompt the customer for payment information.
3. Free tier. To create a free tier, add a number of 'Included Units' to each product item making up a pricing plan. This will allow the user to consume that number of units for free before the usage begins to be billed.
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• Flexible commitment plans
  To capture the highest value enterprise deals, there is often some element of negotiation, and custom pricing involved. To lock in these rates over time, commitments are commonly used where the buyer commits to a certain spend over a given time frame. Amberflo provides several options for managing commitments on the platform:

1. Prepayment with draw-down. The committed amount is paid up front and credited to the account as prepaid credits. Usage is drawn down against the prepaid balance as normal.
2. Installment-based. The committed amount is divided into installment payments to be paid at configurable intervals throughout the commitment period.
3. Pay-as-you-go with true-up. Usage is metered and billed normally according to the payment plan selected. At the time of the final invoice of the commitment period, if the total spend over that period has not yet reached the committed amount, then that difference will be applied to the invoice in a true-up. If the total spend is equal to or greater than the committed amount, then no additional action will be taken.

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News and Blog

Insightful articles and perspectives from around the web.

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• Experiment and Optimize Usage-Based Pricing Plans and Billing with Price Modeling
  Price Modeling exists to create predictability and offer an analytical framework to test, evaluate, and improve usage-based pricing plans based on real-world usage data, rather than gut instinct. Whether a company is just starting out with usage-based pricing or looking to react to changing customer behaviors and economic conditions as we are seeing now, Price Modeling is an indispensable tool. Users can forecast and compare the impact and performance of different pricing plans by simulating the plans on real historical usage data from the Metering service. Read the full blog post here.