SaaS billing with Omnistrate¶

Billing for your Service¶

Omnistrate supports usage-based billing for your customers with two main options:

Service providers can manage complete customer billing workflow through Omnistrate. This includes usage metering, pricing configuration, quota management, automatic invoice generation and notifications, and integration with payment processors.
Service providers with existing billing systems will be able to collect usage metering data from Omnistrate and integrate them with their billing system.

End-to-End Billing flow and features¶

Omnistrate provides a complete solution for usage-based billing for your service. It provides the following features:

Metering: Collect usage data for your service
Aggregation: Aggregate usage data across all the nodes of an instance and per customer
Invoicing: Generate invoices for your customers
Payment: Integrate with payment processors to collect payments
Pricing plans: Service providers can configure pricing plans for their service and enforce quotas/restrictions per service-plan.
Notifications: Notify customers about their invoices and show them the current usage.

End-to-End Billing one-time setup¶

As a service provider, one needs to follow these steps:

Enable Customer Billing
Enable Stripe Connect with your standard Stripe Account
Complete the business profile information
Configure pricing
Configure quotas for your service plan
Configure invoices
Customer Notifications

Enable Customer Billing¶

To enable customer billing, please navigate to the User Profile > Customer Billing section. As a service provider, you can request Omnistrate to enable the feature.

Enable Stripe Connect¶

Once the feature is enabled, the service provider can configure their payment method using the “Stripe Connect” widget. Click “Enable” on the widget, and it will direct you to the subsequent “Stripe Connect” page.

To use Stripe for processing payments, you must set up a standard Stripe account. Enter all required business information, including address and payment details, so the platform can process billing payments successfully.

For more details on how we establish the connection, see the Stripe Documentation.

Complete Business Profile Information¶

Navigate to the next step in the “Customer Billing” section to complete your business profile information such as your address. Please note that the information updated here will reflect in the invoices along with the logo.

Configure Pricing¶

Once the billing is enabled at an account level, you can configure the pricing for your service at a per-plan basis by navigating to the integrations screen. You can configure the pricing for the following pre-set dimensions:

CPU Cores
Allocated Memory
Allocated Storage.

In addition, you can restrict your customers from creating an instance if they had not configured payment. You can set global quota limits on the number of instances that they can create.

Configure Quotas¶

As part of the billing configuration, you can set quotas for your customers. You can set the maximum number of instances that your customers can create and restrict customers from creating resources if they had not configured payment at service plan level.

Configure Invoices¶

Once the billing is enabled, Omnistrate will automatically generate invoices for your customers based on their usage. The invoices will be generated based on the usage data collected by Omnistrate.

To manage the monthly invoices and approve them, navigate to "Manage Fleet" section of the UX and click on "Manage Invoices". If you would like to auto-approve all your generated invoices after a certain period, please request through support.

Customer Notifications¶

Omnistrate will automatically notify your customers about their invoices. The notifications will be sent to the email address provided by your customers.

Your customers will be able to track their usage and invoices through the customer portal. Your customers will have the ability to configure payments with Stripe and pay their invoices through the portal.

Integrate with existing billing system¶

Alternatively, a service provider may enable "Omnistrate Metering" to collect usage data and integrate with your billing system. The usage data will contain a line for each billing dimension and will include information about the cloud, region, and customer that used the service. The information for all your clouds and services that you have is collected in a single S3 bucket, allowing you to have a centralized view of the usage and process the billing information.

To enable metering for your SaaS, follow these steps:

Enable metering integration
Grant privileges to Omnistrate to write to your S3 bucket

Enable metering integration¶

You can add the below to your compose spec or just add metering integration through Omnistrate API/CTL/UI

x-omnistrate-integrations:
  - omnistrateMetering

Grant privileges¶

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::914366220572:root"
            },
            "Action": "s3:PutObject",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::[bucketName]/*"
        }
    ]
}

Usage metering data from Omnistrate can be integrated with your existing billing system or used to manually generate invoices. The usage data generated by Omnistrate might require custom transformations as mandated by your billing provider.

To manually create invoices, first consolidate the usage data to calculate hourly usage by determining the maximum values from 5-minute intervals and multiplying these by the price per dimension. Once the value for the invoice is calculated you can use your payment processor to input the price manually and send the request for payment.

For more complex scenarios, your billing system may require adding specific customer billing details to usage records. Service providers can accommodate this by assigning an external billing id when creating resource instances for customers.