We want your opinion: Invoice Preview

We are developing a new preview for invoices on our Organization Overview page.

We want you to know what’s free and what’s going to be charged for.

Right now we have these screenshots and we want your opinion on what to improve here.

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I think this is a good start! :slight_smile:

Would be nice if I could see a breakdown per app.

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A few comments, with the general theme being - make it easier to take it in visually, quickly :slight_smile: :

  1. Show invoice period as 2 tiny calendars with the dates circled

  2. For itemized billing entries, provide a checkbox or dropdown at the top to say ‘in English please’. What this should do is convert

    • 53535362467 seconds to 7d 23h 59m 59s
    • 6346347347 bytes to KiB/MiB/GiB or KB/KB/GB

Hopefully this should help those lines look better, in a more fixed width fashion.
To go back to the raw view, you could call it, ‘I am a robot’.
Also, numbers look neat when they’re in monospaced fonts.

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Billing in general is kind of hard to find being on Organizations > Org > Billing

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I would love to see which app is responsible for how much of the invoice. Or is there somewhere a metric to see how much GB/s (and other relevant statistics for the invoice) a specific machine consumed? Thanks!

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@lubien – figured out put this here instead of opening a new thread. I just opened my preview invoice, and something’s not quite right. It reports a total of $7.38 (Mar 1 - Apr 1, 2023), and yet the total of the items is $3.69.

Hi @miker thanks for sharing that with us.

I’ve identified a display error that doubled the total value. I will be shipping a fix shortly.

We just shipped a fix, can you verify your preview invoice now?

Would be great to know the cost per app.

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As @FrequentFlyer said above, you’ve just got to make those time spans and byte sizes more humane. As currently presented they are essentially meaningless… just a blob of numbers that don’t really mean anything without manually converting them into a more useful format. I appreciate the exact number matters from a billing point of view but I’m a human viewing them, not a computer.

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Great, looks perfect now, thanks!

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Hi @pier and @Stephen

Improving our invoices is something both on our roadmap and is part of the more extensive scope of the things we are doing right now with billing.

We recently released organization-wide Usage pages for Allocations and Machines which can help for now with reasoning about the costs per month per app. The endgame would be for you not to have to correlate manually those CPU times into dollar values, we will just show you how much each app costs and why.

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Yes we need to improve the increments/breakdowns. It’s a shockingly big project, though. What you’re seeing is the only thing that works with stripe billing. Doing it better means replacing Stripe for most things. Not small! It’s in progress though. :slight_smile:

Hi, is it planned to make this API part of the GraphQL api to support multi-tenancy use cases?

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Vaguely, we need to finish a whole bunch of billing plumbing first though. See the previous post about Stripe Billing.

Hey @starptech @pier @Stephen @kaulse @Alex_Piechowski @Hannes_Nevalainen !

We just shipped a Work in Progress page that breaks down usage per app. It currently only shows machines and volumes usage for now but we plan on improving that and we want your feedback if possible!

Tomorrow I plan on making a #fresh-produce announcement but since you are pioneers on the feedback that led to this I just wanted to let you know first.

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It’s confusing that there’s no way to distinguish active and deleted apps/machines/volumes. Like I’m seeing a couple of orphaned pg_data volumes from apps that I deleted weeks ago. Am I still being charged for that?

Another issue is showing CPU seconds. I can do the math, but I really have no idea how long 1 million seconds is. Would be a lot better if you converted those to a more human friendly unit like minutes, hours, days, and weeks.

The other thing is the cost in USD per app/resource. Again, I’m shown millions CPU seconds and I have no idea if I should be worried or not :slight_smile:

Finally, it would be great if there was a way to know the percentage each app/resource is consuming. Maybe like a pie chart at the top or just a simple percentage number near the cost in USD.

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Hi @pier , thanks for your feedback on this!

We already addressed some of your feedback points, they are awesome, and we will still be looking at the rest of them as we iterate through this page.

We also started a new #fresh-produce post about it in case you wanna follow up: Usage Digest Page

1 Like