FAQ: Private Plan Billing Information for End-Customer

Q: We are looking to provide a private solution to end customers. I have a concern regarding the billing information, would the end-customers be able to see the costs generated? 

 

We would not like end customers to see the costs, and then send them a bill at the end of the month to pay for the solution. Is this possible? 

 

We are not using IaaC yet, deployment in the end would still be manual in the customer's tenant. What we need is a "trusted" entity between them and their end-customer due to a business requirement.  

 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/private-plans 

 

I looked at private plans but didn't find anything relating to billing. Looking at this I don't think it's possible to do what I am looking for as End-customers can see the costs: 

 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/azure-purchasing-invoicing

 

A: If it’s a SaaS offer then you can indeed charge an end price (for infra + IP) to the customer as they wish. If it’s managed app, then the publisher has no control over the Azure costs since it’s infra deployed in the customer tenant and they charge only for the IP on top.

Also managed apps need to be IaC via Arm templates so if you want to get started with working “manually” you should go the SaaS route.

 

If you need to deploy in the Customer tenant, the only way to go is the Azure Application (Managed App) since SaaS assumes solution is hosted and managed by the partner. With Azure Application, the solution must be deployed with an ARM template, however there are ways around having to deploy 100% of the solution using that ARM template. Some partners have not been able to deploy the whole solution using ARM (because it requires more complex connectivity between solution and customer environment). In this case, the ARM deploys the foundation of the infrastructure, and the partner can go and manually create the rest of the resources in the Managed Resrource group (and the customer environment) after the fact.

 

In the Azure Application scenario, there is no way to hide the infrastructure cost from the end customer since the infrastructure runs in their (the customer's) Azure environment, and they would pay for that directly to Microsoft like any other resource they run.