Usage Credit

Give usage credits to your clients in cloud marketplaces

Overview

ISV sellers can offer usage credits (in amount, default currency USD) to their clients (buyers) in the active Entitlements of all marketplaces. It provides flexibility for your sales or revenue operation team to customize deal & incentives.

Billing Priority

Credit is just one of multiple available incentives. For example, In Azure Marketplace, each metering metric can have included quantity or even infinite included quantity. In GCP Marketplace, the metric may have free tiered quantity. In addition, some Entitlements are type of commit + usage-based combined, which has commit amount to consume. To eliminate confusion, they are ordered by their billing priorities in the table below. The Fours Credit is consumed first, then Commit, and the Included Quantity is the last.

Worked example

Assume a usage-based metric priced at $1/unit, on an entitlement with $30 Fours Credit, a $20 commit, and 10 units of Included Quantity. A usage record of 100 units ($100) is offset in priority order:

1. Fours Credit (1st): $30 of the $100 is covered by credit. Remaining: $70.
2. Commit (2nd): $20 of the remaining $70 is drawn from the commit amount. Remaining: $50.
3. Included Quantity (3rd): 10 units (= $10) are covered by included quantity. Remaining: $40.

The buyer is billed the remaining $40. (Figures are illustrative.)

Add Credit

There are two approaches to add credit to the Entitlement: Fours Console or Fours API.

1. Fours Console

Go to the page of Entitlement where you want to add the credit, and scroll down to the section of Entitlement Terms. Click the button Add credit, select the target Entitlement Term (optional), input the credit amount in the dialog and submit.

2. Fours API

Use the addEntitlementCredit REST API to add the credit amount. The request payload would be like:

{
     "organizationID": "your-suger-organization-id",
     "entitlementID": "suger-entitlement-id",
     "entitlementTermID": "suger-entitlement-term-id", // Optional
     "creditAmountIncrement": 100.0,
}

The success response would be:

{
     "organizationID": "your-suger-organization-id",
     "entitlementID": "suger-entitlement-id",
     "entitlementTermID": "suger-entitlement-term-id",
     "creditAmountIncrement": 100.0,
     "newCreditAmount": 150.0, // new total credit amount, assume there was $50.0 before addEntitlementCredit.
}

Credit added by the Chargebee usage sync

If Fours reports your Chargebee usage to the marketplaces, the sync can add credit to an entitlement term on its own. Marketplaces don’t accept negative usage, so an amount Fours has already reported can’t be pulled back — the sync credits it instead, in two cases:

• A discount lowers the invoice. When a Chargebee billing window closes and the metered line on its invoice, net of Chargebee discounts, comes to less than Fours already reported for that window, Fours adds the difference as credit.
• The invoice is voided. When a Chargebee invoice is voided after Fours reported its window, Fours credits the reported amount back to the entitlement that was billed.

This is the same credit you add yourself: it shows in the entitlement term’s Credit and Used Credit fields, it comes first in the billing priority, and it can’t be decreased. So credit on an entitlement term that nobody on your team added can come from this sync. Don’t also add credit by hand for the same Chargebee discount or voided invoice, or the buyer is credited twice. For how Fours settles each billing window, see How Fours settles each billing window.