Overview

The purpose of this article is to help our resellers have conversations with their customers about billing variances that they may see in the native AWS console versus the billing data reported in the platform.


We strongly encourage our AWS resellers to provide end-customers with access to your StreamOne Ion Customer Portal. Please read the Knowledge Base articles: Customer Portal and Storefront options and How to Setup and Manage End User Access and Password Resets. It is essential that our AWS partners understand how to estimate AWS costs using the AWS Pricing Calculator. This is a free AWS Well-Architected Lab - Level 100 Cost Estimation.

 

TDS supports various configurations of billing consolidation. A reseller typically has a combination MPAs.

  • Shared Master Payers - multiple resellers and multiple end customers under a single AWS organization.
  • Dedicated Master Payers (by Reseller) - A reseller is set up with an MPA where they manage multiple end customer accounts.
  • Dedicated Master Payers (by End Customer) - Reseller requests a dedicated payer for a single end user company when SSO, control tower, and other advanced features are required and specific to a customer's domain.

 

Blended Rates

AWS combines the prices of two or more pricing models to calculate the overall cost for a specific usage of their services.  This pricing model is intended to provide distributors like TD SYNNEX with a more simplified and cost-effective way to pay for AWS usage. Blended rates consider the usage of multiple services, including data transfer, storage, and compute resources, and calculate a single rate based on the overall usage of those services. This allows TDS to easily understand and predict costs, in order for customers to optimize their AWS usage to minimize costs. AWS blended rate is available for some of their services like EC2 instances, RDS, ElastiCache and Redshift. This effective price per hour is displayed as the "blended" rate in your Cost and Usage Report or AWS Cost Explorer. The blended rate shown in the console is for informational purposes only. StreamOne ION determines the correct price for each member account based on the account's actual consumption.


AWS Volume Pricing

AWS Volume Pricing refers to the pricing structure for Amazon Web Services (AWS) products and services that allows TD SYNNEX to purchase a large quantity of services at a discounted rate. This type of pricing is often used by accounts who need a high volume of services on a regular basis, such as businesses or organizations that use AWS for their primary operations. The specific discounts and pricing tiers available through volume pricing can vary depending on the product or service in question.


AWS Free Tier:

The Free Tier (12 month's free*) benefits under Consolidated Billing across multiple accounts will only have access to one Free Tier per Organization.  TD SYNNEX does not allocate free tier benefits between multiple accounts in shared payers. 


*12-Months Free: These free tier offers are only available to new AWS customers and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your 12-month free usage term expires or if your application use exceeds the tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.


Always Free: These free tier offers do not automatically expire at the end of your 12-month AWS Free Tier term but are available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely.


Trials: These free tier offers are short term trial offers that start from the time of first usage begins. Once the trial period expires you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details).


The Amazon AWS Free Tier applies to participating services across our global regions. Your free usage under the AWS Free Tier is calculated each month across all regions and automatically applied to your bill – free usage does not accumulate. The AWS Free Tier is not available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions* or the China (Beijing) region currently.


TD SYNNEX and Consolidated Billing and Blended Rates

TDS is financially responsible to AWS for service payments for our reseller and your customers. We use AWS Organizations' consolidated billing feature (or master payer account) (MPA). Because TDS manages all AWS Organizations, the use of consolidated billing allows aggregated usage costs for accounts within the organization, enabling the "family of accounts" to reach lower pricing tiers faster.


AWS considers all accounts in an organization as if they are one account for billing purposes. The pricing tiers and capacity reservations of the organization's accounts are combined into a single consolidated bill. Combining the accounts into a single bill may result in a lower effective price per hour for some services. To determine the applicable volume pricing tiers for TD SYNNEX, AWS uses consolidated billing to combine all customers' usage. StreamOne ION calculates the correct price for each member account based on actual consumption.


When AWS allocates Reserved Instance hours to member accounts, it always begins with the account that purchased the reservation. If there are hours left over from the capacity reservation, AWS applies them to other accounts in the same Availability Zone that use identical usage types. AWS also assigns a regional RI based on instance size: the RI is applied to the smallest instance in the instance family first, then the next smallest, and so on. AWS applies a RI, or a fraction of a RI based on the instance's normalization factor. The order in which AWS applies RIs has no effect on pricing.


With blended rates, accounts running On Demand instances (meaning did not invest in an RI or savings plan) that match another account's reservation the customer may see a lower hourly charge applied to their bill from the AWS console. The Account Activity page for each linked account will still display the correct number of instance hours used by these accounts.

 

How consolidated bills are calculated:

A Reserved Instance is a reservation of resources and capacity for either one or three years, for a particular Availability Zone within a region. Unlike on-demand, when you purchase a reservation, you commit to paying for a specific number of hours for the 1-or 3-year term; in exchange, the hourly rate is lowered significantly. From a technical perspective, there is no difference between a Reserved Instance and an On-Demand instance. When a customer launches an instance, AWS checks the account records for Reserved Instance purchases that can be applied to that instance.

 

Accounts in the platform roll up to the consolidated payer (or MPA). This group of accounts is often called an "account family." The org can view all usage incurred by the account family. This activity is aggregated in the payer account and then "allocated" to linked accounts that generated the charge in proportion to the linked accounts' usage. In other words, the linked account line items that you see in the AWS Cost and Usage report, or monthly or hourly reports on the Account Activity page, are calculated recursively: The charges are calculated at the payer level and then allocated to linked accounts. Blended Rates appear only on linked account line items. (Blended rates do not equal customer pricing or MSRP).

 

Rounding in the Billing Reports:

  • The usage in the Detailed Billing Report in SIE receives data directly from the AWS DBR, however, given that individual usage billing details can extend up to 9 decimal points.
  • The rounding in the DBR view occurs at the individual line-item level, then accumulating recursively with similar line items. The DBR does all the fractional hours and fees.
  • If you want to view rounding to the penny, download the DBR view of the billing data (Export Details Billing Reports).
  • A billing report that is generated after a billing statement has been created will maintain the view of billing for a specific billing period. When you run the same report for the past month, you are likely to see changes to the billing report.
  • The seller column of the billing report could be higher than the values received on your invoice from Tech Data.  The invoices are not rounded, they are calculated with all decimal points, then totaled at the service category, then rounded to the nearest penny.
  • Usage reports are dynamic and could change at any time.

To summarize rounding, the usage report represents a rounded view of the bill. You can drill deeper into the billing details and the specific service line item will display with rounding at the second decimal point. The only way to reconcile the billing details, rounded to "the penny", is to use the detailed billing file in the platform (DBR).


 


In Summary

Customer Pricing (MSRP) and Blended Rates (averaged rates) are not comparable, particularly when viewed in the AWS billing section. RI vs on-demand services, volume discounts, custom price books, incomplete support costs, special charges (e.g., custom support plans, custom managed services fees), or special program discounts are just a few of the factors that could result in billing variances between AWS and StreamOne Ion. This price per hour is displayed as the "blended" rate in your Cost and Usage Report or AWS Cost Explorer. The blended rates displayed in the customer's console are for informational purposes only.  Volume prices and blended rates can be viewed when customers navigate the native AWS billing screen, because TDS does not block blended rates.  As a result, it's critical to "get ahead" of this conversation in order to provide a positive customer experience before connecting AWS accounts to the platform.  

Sample Communication for Resellers to End-Customers

 

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When there are multiple accounts under a shared consolidated payer (Org), your charges in the AWS console are reflective of the combination of the other accounts and AWS services in the same payer. When you’re looking at the AWS native billing console, you may see different pricing based on other cumulative customer purchases, which may include volume discounts and reserved instances in the same availability zones and regions you have setup in your AWS accounts.

 

For all the strengths that the AWS platform offers, there's a bit of complexity around Reserved Instances (RI) and Consolidated Billing. We often hear questions about how to effectively ensure that costs are properly tracked and allocated. Rather than looking for all matching resources with an individual account, AWS automatically applies RI benefits to matching resources across all linked accounts. Therefore, you may see a different price in the AWS console than on your statement from the platform. Our platform keeps track of all services, volume discounts, and RI purchases and applies the correct pricing to the individual accounts. This means the platform is keeping the benefits for the accounts that made the investment in the RI purchase. Per the AWS documentation, accounts that participate in a consolidated billing scenario (which is the case working with us) can take advantage of the platform and other partner services. For all linked AWS accounts, the native AWS console cannot be used to view accurate billing information. The usage information will be 100% aligned, but the billing data is impacted due to consolidation and blended rates, as explained in the above paragraph.


Here is a LINK from AWS that provides billing examples for specific services. Additionally, here is a LINK to AWS that describes Blended Rates, which is the core issue regarding billing differences in the AWS console versus the true billing information in the Customer Portal [add your customer portal URL here].

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