Passing through usage pricing

Iron_Pulley
Iron_Pulley Member Posts: 1 ✭
edited November 1 in General

How are others handling passing on usage based pricing to their downstream clients?

Say I end up with hundreds of clients that are all using various amounts of transformations, storage, and bandwidth. What are some methods for monitoring this at the client level so each client can have pricing based on their usage?

Tagged:

Best Answer

  • Stephen
    Stephen Member, Cloudinary Staff Posts: 33
    Answer ✓

    Hi,

    Depending on your exact requirements, several different options are available to calculate or approximate the percentage of your usage attributable to each of your clients.

    A common method of separating usage for different customers is to use a different product environment for each client. This is because we track your account's usage at the product environment level for quota/billing purposes. You can easily use that to determine what percentage of your plan's quota was used by each client (and allow you to bill them accordingly if applicable).

    This option is available on all of our enterprise plans, and on our self-service plans at "Plus" or higher - there is a charge associated with each product environment after those included with each plan, which I believe is usually passed directly to the end-client in such cases and if you have many such customers, our sales team can assist with creating a plan with sufficient product environments

    For customers on our smaller plans, or if you don't want to or can't create a product environment for each client, our recommendation is to store the assets for each client in different folders. Our reports don't support showing a breakdown of usage by folder, but there are ways to approximate the usage or calculate it via other means, if necessary.

    For example, you can calculate the storage usage and number of files for each client by using our Admin API periodically to read the details of the files in your account, including the space used by derived versions of images and videos, and you can calculate transformations used by tracking your upload API calls (or counting new files added to the account) as well as the creation of new derived assets in each folder.

    On our enterprise plans, it's possible for us to set up CDN log delivery to an Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage bucket of your choice - in that case, you'll have the raw request logs for all files and can use those to calculate the exact bandwidth usage for each file yourself.

    For customers on our self service plans, or where you can't read and process the logs, our standard reports cover the top 100 assets for each day / time period, so you can use that to calculate the approximate percentage of your bandwidth usage attributable to each client. (assuming that the 'top' requests are in proportion to the other requests)

    Regards,

    Stephen

Categories