Introducing the new “Unified Billing” feature, which allows Organizations to share billing under one Billing Organization. That means one invoice for all your apps across your main and linked Organizations.
The story up until now
Up until this point, each organization has been responsible for its own billing. This resulted in each organization needing a payment method and receiving a separate invoice at the end of the month. If you’d like to continue using Fly this way then you can.
What’s new
Now with “unified billing” a new organization can have it’s billing linked to another existing organization.
You can think of linked organizations simply as containers for your apps. They function the same way they always have except that any usage is sent to its billing organization.
Why would I want multiple Organizations?
There are many reasons you might want to split up your apps into different organizations, but here are a few that we often see:
- You want to split up your apps for different environments. For example, you have a prod organization and a staging one.
- You want to have more access control for your apps. For example, only key members are invited to your prod organization, but the whole team is part of the staging one.
- For security reasons you’d like to split up your apps so that they aren’t visible to each other over Fly’s Private Network (by default apps within the same organization are connected over an internal network).
- Networking between Organizations is still possible with Flycast. Actually, you can use it to customize networks in all sorts of neat ways.
- You want to have a different organization per project.
- You want to create sandbox environments contained in a single Organization
- You’re an agency that wants to create an organization per client
Heads up, the current limit on Linked Organizations is 100 per Billing Organization (we hope to increase or remove this limitation entirely sometime in the future)
All of the points above are already possible with the old system, but unified billing removes the headache of managing individual invoices.
How do I use Unified Billing?
When you create a new organization you’ll have the option to create a “Linked Organization” instead, at which point you can select a parent Billing Organization.
Is there a cost per Organization?
Nope!
What about purchased credits and Machine Reservations Blocks?
Purchased credits are shared between Linked Organizations and the Billing Organization since all the usage flows to one place.
The same applies to Machine Reservation Blocks if you’re looking for a discount.
Can I link my existing organizations together?
(clarification: existing organizations means created Organizations before the release of this feature)
Your existing Organizations can serve as the primary Billing Organization, but existing organizations can’t be converted into Linked Organizations at this time.
Instead we recommend creating a new organization and moving your apps to it.
My Organization is on a Launch/Scale Plan, but what about my linked ones?
Linked Organizations share their resources with their parent billing organization. We think it’s easier to think of Linked Organizations as plan-less, but if it helps you can think of them as inheriting the plan of their Billing Organization.
For example, the included usage from the Launch Plan would be shared across all linked organizations.
For example, have a Launch Plan for premium support would apply to all of your Linked Organizations too.
Documentation?
It’s here: Fly.io Billing · Fly Docs
Feedback and questions
We’d love to know what you think and and what you’d like to see with the future of this feature. We have a lot more planned for Unified Billing and we hope it will overall be a helpful ergonomic upgrade to simplify billing.
