Metered usage

This topic introduces metered usage, which is supported by the Metered usage V1 and V2 REST APIs (see Metered usage V1 and Metered usage V2).

AppDirect marketplaces support metered usage billing, also known as usage-based billing, which is how marketplaces or Developers charge users for their variable use of a product during each billing period.

Developers configure metered usage through pricing settings for each product edition and add-on product. Typically, you use the unit that you set within the pricing settings to measure and charge for usage, for example each gigabyte, hour, or user license that a user uses.

When you enable metered usage pricing, AppDirect marketplaces expose an API endpoint that you can use to report usage to the marketplace that owns the user's (customer's) account. For example, you can report the number of gigabytes of storage that users use, and the marketplace charges them for it based on the pre-configured or custom price that you define per gigabyte.

📝 Note: When your marketplace uses credit limit validation for metered usage (Early Availability; contact your AppDirect technical representative to enable it), posted metered usage can count toward the customer’s credit limit as soon as it is posted, which may restrict new purchases, renewals, or upgrades until credit is available. For details, see Credit limit and the 734 release note.

AppDirect also allows you to upload the file data in standard and custom formats through the UI. The custom format allows you to define your own usage format using the custom usage reader.

📝 Note: To use custom metered usage, ensure the Allow custom metered usage option is enabled at the product level. For more information on enabling the option, see Add recurring editions.

After metered usage is submitted, Marketplace Managers and Developers who belong to a Developer company and own IaaS products can check whether metered usage processed successfully, view errors, and manage failures. For details, see Metered usage processing status.

The metered usage details page helps you navigate usage data and identify subscriptions or customers that were missed in the monthly billing process because they were not available in the marketplace. You can reprocess usage that was previously filtered out after you migrate the related subscriptions. For details, see View metered usage processing status.