Offer ability for third parties to use Azure billing system for their customers
anonymous
shared this idea
8 comments
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Andrea Piccoli
commented
Windows Azure Marketplace support the sell of azure application but still have any problems in the billing lifecycle becouse require a VAT EU account and not support personal VAT ID (CF in Italy)
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Mrinal Jaiswal
commented
This is needed.
In case we are developing a SaaS application, which end user will purchase from Microsoft Marketplace. We need api to add our amount into the bill being generated for customer by Microsoft.
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Pat Wood
commented
This is needed because customers tend to scrutinize their bills and ask a lot of questions. We need better documentation for our customers.
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spgennard
commented
I work for a vendor that wants to promote its tools/languages in Azure but we charge for our runtime and a pay-as-you billing system in Azure for us is a must.
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Robert Shurtleff
commented
Also note that there is another suggestion was at the bottom that is the same as this one:
http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/pages/34192-windows-azure-feature-voting/suggestions/411226-integrate-billing-services-to-use-access-control-and-other-features-trials-for-paying-customers?ref=title -
Robert Shurtleff
commented
I knew I would find the #1 sleeper request down this list.
This is perhaps the REAL, highest ROI, truly build a dev and partner community feature on any list!!!
Microsoft has traditionally done very well in understanding the need and value of building the dev and partner communities around their products. Azure is no exception.
But, to really make it easy to get partners to build and deploy solutions to Azure, the need for a pay-as-you-go monitoring and billing system will be critical!
Example 1: Individual Service Usage
Let's say I build a Service Scheduling service. Sort of like a Azure-based cron service. Other devs can scheuld their services to be run/pinged on a desired schedule.In the new pay-as-you-consume-it Azure world, my subscribers could only have to pay for each callback.
Would sure be nice to leverage the existing usage managment and billing services?
Example 2: Solution Re-seller
As mentioned by Phillip earlier, If I'm providing a full solution that is hosted on Azure, it would be much more desireable to use Azure if I could register my various Azure services as being used by certain of my customers and be able to leverage the Azure usage management and billing layers for my own billing.Bottom line: Microsoft, make it easy for me to accuratly track my own customer's usage of my Azure solutions, thus making it easier for me to make money. The easier you make it for me to make money, the easier it is for me to build solutions on Azure. The more solutions I build on Azure, the more money you (Microsoft) make. win-win-win !
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Phillip
commented
Yes, definently. Otherwise I am stuck making my own billing and service tracking system.
Amazon's Payment service was confusing to use. We were never able to get it to work very well.
I would like to see Microsoft do something where I can tell the billing service, these 3 instances are for this customer and these 2 instances plus this SQL Azure is for this customer. etc. Instead of using a development model to configure the billing system make it easy. just let me specify which services and projects go to what customer and let the current Azure billing system (the one you use to bill us with) just seperate each customers usage and give me a report.
The Amazon Payment Service was crap, and not very friendly, at least, not to us. Make yours better! Assuming you feature this idea.
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jeff
commented
Implement a service like Amazon's payment services allowing users of azure to securely charge customers
