Concept
Usage Metering And Billing
The SCA meters each tenant's protected VMs and storage, applies provider-defined rate cards and exports monthly statements without processing payments.
Overview
The SCA meters each tenant's protected-VM and storage consumption and turns it into monthly per-tenant billing artifacts. It reports what was used and prices it against a provider-defined rate card; it does not move money.
Resell prices are the provider's own. Sendense dictates no prices and performs no payment processing — the SCA produces per-tenant statements that the provider carries into its own commercial systems.
Metered billing is a CSP-edition capability, where the provider provisions and owns the tenant estate. MSP engagements license each customer SHA independently and do not resell consumption through the SCA.
What Is Metered
The SCA meters two quantities per tenant, sourced from signed appliance heartbeats:
- Protected-VM usage on the tenant's managed SHA, on a measured basis. A tenant has exactly one managed SHA, and its estate fans out to many SNAs and sites beneath that single hub.
- Storage consumption expressed as average daily TB over the billing period.
- Storage consumption is metered per tenant today; a per-repository breakdown is only partial, so storage lines are not fully itemized by repository.
Rate Cards
A rate card is the provider's price book. Its lines are keyed to the units licensing already denominates — per protected VM and per TB — and a tenant can carry commercial overrides.
Quota And Overage
Each tenant carries an operational quota — the protected-VM allocation carved from the provider's license pool. The quota is an enforcement and alert threshold: a fleet sweeper raises an alert when measured usage crosses it.
Protected VMs above the quota are both alerted and billed, at the rate card's overage rate.
Overage is a protected-VM concept
Storage consumed above a bucket's quota still bills as ordinary consumption — it was used — and raises an enforcement alert. There is no separate storage overage rate.
Statements And Exports
At the end of each period the SCA produces a monthly per-tenant statement:
- A statement is immutable once the period closes; a correction is issued as a new superseding version rather than an edit in place.
- Statements are pulled through a partner-scoped API as JSON, into the provider's own CRM or accounting.
- The underlying usage time series is available through the same API as JSON or CSV, for providers that reconcile against raw consumption.
What It Is Not
The SCA's billing role has firm edges:
- Sendense sets no prices and processes no payments; resell pricing and collection are the provider's.
- The SCA meters and states usage — it produces statements and usage series, not invoices, and runs no payment flows.
- Backup data never transits the SCA; only signed usage and health signals from appliance heartbeats do.
- Statements and usage are pulled from the API; the SCA emits no billing webhooks.
- In MSP engagements each customer SHA is licensed independently, and the SCA does not resell their consumption.
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