CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesaws-marketplacemetering
Zigglzworth
Zigglzworth

Reputation: 6813

AWS Marketplace Metering Service: Is reporting every hour required?

I have an AWS Marketplace SAAS product which charges subscribed customers based on usage using the AWS MarketplaceMetering BatchMeterUsage API

In the documentation found here, AWS writes:

"We recommend that you send a metering record every hour to give customers as much granular visibility into their usage and costs as possible. If you aggregate usage in time periods greater than an hour (for example, one day), continue sending metering records every hour and record a quantity of 0 if there is no usage to report for that hour. Report usage to AWS on an hourly basis for all of your customers, in batches of up to 25 at a time."

However in my service, a cost incurring event usually only occurs once a day (or on demand). It is not an hourly measure such as bandwidth, compute time, etc. Sending metering records hourly seems like it would be a waste of resources both on my side and AWS side.

In my tests sending BatchMeterUsage only when an event incurs a cost, the API replies with status success (I assume it means the costs to the customer will be charged by AWS).

My question is: What are the implications of NOT sending metering records every hour? Is this simply a light recommendation, meaning that metering records sent only when a cost incurring event occurs will still be honored despite no 0 usage calls sent every hour? Or will doing so cause some kind of penalty to an AWS product that does so?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 100

Answers (1)

Shelly Dar Rapaport
Shelly Dar Rapaport

Reputation: 96

Nothing will happen, BUT:

  1. If the customer decides to unsubscribe, you get one hour to charge them from the moment you get the SNS notification. That mean that if there is a failure in the submission, you won't get paid...
  2. The customer will not have visibility on the spend until you submit the metering. They might dispute the amount, or decide that it's too costly. This might result in bad customer experience.
  3. As you scale to more and more customers, you would need to send more API requests (There is a limit to the usage records sent in the API), and you might want to create more dimensions. Consider it in your design.

Upvotes: 0

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