Cloud Marketplace Invoicing

Overview

For Cloud Marketplaces (AWS, Azure and GCP), SaaS product offering requires SaaS customer usage report continuously and precisely on a fixed schedule in order to invoice SaaS customer correctly. Paigo has the cloud marketplace integration fully automated so that SaaS business just needs to enable it with one click. Paigo platform automatically measures SaaS customer usage, collects into database for persistence, and aggregates according to the policy of marketplace, report usage to marketplace API by a scheduler, and finally consolidates revenue data from marketplaces.

Different cloud marketplaces have different levels of support for usage-based billing, their terminologies and limitations are different as well. Paigo works as a consolidated billing layer on top of all cloud marketplaces to enhance their billing support while leveraging their payment option as a revenue channel.

The diagram below illustrates how Paigo being the proxy of cloud marketplaces and enhances the billing functionality on top of marketplaces.

Usage Reporting

In order to bill customers based on usage, marketplaces requires reporting of customers usage on a regular basis in order to invoice customers correctly at the end of the month. Paigo automatically takes care of the usage reporting requirement for usage-based billing. The high-level workflow works as such:

1. Usage measurement and collection: Paigo does deep integration with SaaS application to measure and collect each SaaS customers' usage in real-time.

2. Data aggregation: aggregate raw usage data into the level of granularity required by different marketplaces. Such as on AWS, the usage data has to be aggregated to an hour level.

3. Data reporting: use scheduler infrastructure to deliver the aggregated data to different APIs of marketplaces.

The entire usage reporting works as a blackbox to SaaS application. So there is no additional work needed on the SaaS application side to accommodate marketplace invoicing.

Payment

Paigo uses cloud marketplace as a payment channel. On the basis of automatic Usage Reporting, cloud marketplace will generate invoices sent to SaaS customers. The revenue collected from SaaS customers will be subsequently sent to SaaS business account.

Cloud marketplaces also charge transaction fee as a percentage of revenue invoiced. For specific fee structure, consult the specific cloud platform teams.

Offering

There are a few critical challenges in terms of managing pricing plans on Cloud marketplace.

1. Different cloud platforms have different models for pricing plans. Examples are public offering, private contracts, SaaS, subscriptions, etc. Those models come with various strength and limitations.

2. Apart from many kinds of models to deal with, another challenge with multiple cloud marketplaces is maintaining the consistency between the pricing structures, or pricing parity.

3. Multiple platforms also comes with the challenge of various APIs and technologies to integration.

Paigo allows SaaS business to bypass all of these challenges by providing a uniform Offering system that can be applied across platforms. Paigo incorporates different Offering structures, and deals with platform specific terminology and APIs underneath. SaaS business only needs to use Paigo dashboard or Paigo API to manage Offerings across the board.

Enhanced Billing

Cloud marketplaces provide limited billing function. Paigo as a billing layer on top of cloud marketplaces, enhanced the billing solution with great flexibility and powerfulness. With Paigo, Cloud marketplace invoicing can be enhanced with free trial, prepaid credits, usage entitlement, flexible B2B deal structure, itemized invoice or revenue recovery.

Consolidated Analytics

In Paigo's analytical dashboard, SaaS business can see consolidated analytics such as revenue recognition metrics (monthly recurring revenue or annual recurring revenue) taking into account both cloud marketplace revenue as well as other revenue sources such as Stripe.

Cloud Marketplace invoicing is currently in closed preview. Contact [e-mail] to get access.