Archera's Pro Pricing is Flat Rate annual subscription, billed monthly based on the Number of Reservable Resources Running over the last 30 days.
As an Example:
If you would like to upgrade to Pro we would look at the last 30 days of usage, only counting the uptime of resources coverable by commitments (what we call "reservable resources").
This is because commitment optimization is where Archera primarily provides value, so things like S3 & EBS visibility etc. will come for free.
We consider all reservable resources which, for AWS, includes EC2 instances, RDS instances, Elasticache clusters, Elasticsearch clusters, Redshift clusters, Lambda functions, ECS/EKS clusters, and Sagemaker instances.
For each of these resources, we look at the total number of hours that resource was active over the past 30 days (rounding to the nearest hour so very short-lived resources should not incur a charge) and then charge a fee of $1 * (Active Hours / 720) for each resource.
For example a m5.large instance up for the entire 30 days period will result in an additional charge of $1/mo whereas the same instance up only 15 days will results in an additional charge of $0.50/mo.
Why This Billing Model?
We believe the advanced cost visibility & automation is a commodity, so it should be billed based on the cost to deliver the services, rather than the total bill. We also want to have a predictable monthly cost for end-customers that does not fluctuate with unexpected usage changes within the year.
Why Not a Small Percentage of Savings?
While this may sound like a reasonable model & many vendors bill this way this is actually not customer aligned as it incentivizes the vendor to recommend over-commitment by the customer to boost their fee. Additionally, it does not make much sense from a customer value perspective to charge for the upfront savings from year 1 in year 2 if very little changes in the environment.
The one exception to this is GRIs, where the continuous value being delivered is the option to get rid of the commitment & the incentive's are more aligned because in the case of any over-commitment by the customer Archera would bear the cost
Why Not a Small Percentage of Costs?
While on it's face this may also seem like a reasonable model & many vendors bill this way this is also not very customer aligned as it incentivizes the vendor to not maximize the discount achieved by the customer to boost their fee. Additionally, it does not make sense from a customer value perspective for visibility on a GPU VM to cost 15x what visibility for a cheaper CPU VM costs based on the price to process the data from both instances being the same.