Forum Discussion
A2P Phone Number Billing Management
My company has a multi-tenant LOB application hosted in the cloud. We are looking at adding sms text notifications to the application for appointment reminders and 2FA codes. Each tenant will be required to purchase a phone number. My company will manage all ACTIVE phone numbers through our Azure Subscription. We will then individually bill our customers based on USAGE (Messages Sent/Received).
My question. In my Azure Subscription, does Azure break out billing USAGE by phone numbers to determine billing for my Tenants? Is there an API i can pull from to periodically pull usage by phone number? Thanks.
- Nikolay Muravlyannikov
Microsoft
Thanks, for your interest in Azure Communication Services.
For multitenant deployment, you can use a single subscription with single resource or you can create a resource (within the same subscription for every customer).
In either case you can review the cost/create reports pr number or per resource (with all numbers) in the Cost Analysis at the subscription level. Here is API description for programmatic access to the cost datahttps://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/costs/manage-automationthanks for the info. but it appears you're requiring your customers to develop custom reporting solution for billing (or tracking) multi-tenant ACS customer usage per phone number. Yikes. This is a HUGE costly project in itself...not to mention the additional cost for a PowerBI Enterprise account. No thanks. Twilio has this all automated in a nice reporting Dashboard under my Twilio account. Seems Microsoft's answer to everything reporting related is PowerBI which sucks, is expensive and requires technical expertise which we don't have. It might work for your mega Enterprise accounts that have the resources, but not for small to mid size businesses. Wish I could use Azure ACS but just too costly to manage.
