Bill What Customers Actually Consume — Across Every Platform You Run
Seats are easy to bill. Consumption is not. The moment you sell Azure, virtual machines, Kubernetes capacity or AI tokens, the question stops being “how many licences?” and becomes “who used what, at which rate, in which currency, and can we prove it?”
Most teams answer that with exports and spreadsheets. It works for a handful of tenants and quietly loses margin after that. Hybr® collects metered usage from the systems you already run, attributes it to a tenant, rates it against that customer’s price list, and puts it on the same invoice as everything else you sell.
Where usage-based billing actually breaks
- Attribution. The meter knows a resource consumed something. It does not know which of your customers to charge, or which of their departments.
- Rating. Raw consumption is not a price. It has to meet the right rate card, tier, reseller margin and currency before it means anything to finance.
- Timing. Finding out what a tenant spent when the invoice runs is too late to do anything about it.
- Proof. When a customer disputes a line, you need the records behind it, not a recollection of a spreadsheet.
What Hybr® meters
The same rating engine covers every platform under management, so a customer buying three different things still receives one bill:
- Microsoft CSP and Azure — subscriptions, NCE terms and Azure consumption, rated per customer. See Microsoft CSP billing.
- Virtual machines and storage — on VMware vCenter, Azure Local, Hyper-V and Azure Stack Hub.
- Kubernetes and GPU capacity — node and GPU counts per registered cluster, scoped to a tenant or shared. See Kubernetes & GPU-as-a-Service.
- AI and token consumption — spend per tenant and per model from your registered gateway. See LLM Gateway.
- Your own services — anything you publish to the catalog with an offer and a SKU, including managed services and custom metrics.
Pricing models it supports
- Pay-as-you-go — rated purely on measured consumption.
- Committed plus overage — a baseline commitment with metered usage above it.
- Tiered and volume — rates that step down as consumption rises.
- Fixed and recurring — seats, licences and flat fees on the same invoice as metered lines.
- Hybrid — the common real-world case: a platform fee, a seat count and consumption, billed together.
Rates apply per customer, per reseller tier and per currency, so the same service can be sold at different prices to different segments without a second system. More on this in pricing and rate management.
Visible before the invoice, not after
Rated usage is visible while the period is still open. That changes what you can do with it: budgets and thresholds can stop a runaway workload before it becomes an unbilled write-off, tenants can see their own consumption in the self-service portal instead of asking your support team, and you can see margin per service while there is still time to act on it.
Who this is for
- Microsoft CSPs and MSPs adding consumption services to a seat-based portfolio.
- Hosters and cloud providers selling infrastructure by the hour, the core or the gigabyte.
- Enterprises charging shared platform costs back to business units.
Frequently asked questions
What is usage-based billing?
Usage-based billing charges a customer for what they measurably consumed in a period rather than a flat subscription fee. It requires three things a subscription model does not: a meter that records consumption, attribution of that consumption to the right customer, and a rating step that turns raw units into a priced invoice line.
Does Hybr® meter the workload itself?
No. Hybr® collects usage from the systems you already run — Microsoft Partner Center, your cloud accounts, your hypervisors, your registered Kubernetes clusters and your LLM gateway — and does the attribution, rating and invoicing on top. Nothing is instrumented inside your workloads.
Can metered and fixed charges appear on one invoice?
Yes, and that is the normal case. A single invoice can carry Microsoft CSP seats, a fixed managed-service fee, Azure consumption and GPU hours, per customer, in their currency.
How do we stop a tenant running up a bill they cannot pay?
Set budgets and thresholds against rated usage. Because rating happens continuously rather than at invoice time, alerts fire while the period is still open and there is still something to do about it.
What happens when a customer disputes a line?
Each rated line traces back to the underlying usage records and the price list that was applied, so a dispute is a lookup rather than a reconstruction.
Can resellers sell metered services under their own pricing?
Yes. Reseller tiers carry their own rate cards and margins, so the same metered service can reach the end customer at a different price without duplicating the service. See reseller management.
Related: Pricing & Rate Management · Billing & Invoicing · CSP Billing Ultimate · Cloud FinOps · AI Application & Token Billing
Model it against your own price list
Bring one service you sell and the way you want to charge for it. We will build the offer, rate a period of real usage against it, and show you the invoice it produces.