Not a secret that agencieslike mine use Netlify to provide services and hosting sites for our different customers.
Considering this would be interesting having the possibility of defining an e-mail per site to send one notification per month on statistics like build minutes used, traffic (in GB) per each site.
This way, we can configure our client’s email on their sites, guaranteeing they will receive monthly updates on their usage, which makes it easier for us to justify charging them for hosting.
In my agency case, we have different agreements with different clients, such as:
Up to 10GB per site month, we don’t send an invoice / don’t charge.
We send an $X invoice to the client for 11GB or higher traffic per site per month.
50GB or more of traffic per site per month, we send an $Y invoice to the client.
Right now, every month, I need to check and send a screenshot of the particular report of the site along with the invoice because the client doesn’t receive an automatically sent e-mail with statistics of their particular site.
Adopting the above feature suggestion not just helps us but also incentivises developers and agencies to resell the hosting of Netlify, obviously generating more revenue for Netlify and its subsidiaries.
Is this a situation where you have multiple customer sites hosted within the one Netlify account?
I know from speaking with the Agency Partner Team previously that Netlify consider “best practice” for agencies to create an account per-customer and have the customer pay Netlify’s fees directly.
It’s an approach that provides Netlify with both an account fee per-customer and repeated per-seat changes for the agencies developers.
First of all, thank you for contributing to this feature request topic.
Regarding your first question, here is my answer:
Yes — This situation is where we have multiple customer sites under one Netlify account.
We manage several sites for several clients.
We tried the approach you mentioned but decided to discontinue it nowadays because we would need to manage many different CLI tokens and credentials, making it inefficient to sign out / sign in every time we need to make some significant change.
Also, as we usually host the site codes in our GitLab (sometimes GitHub) account, it would be challenging to manage the permissions and different integrations we use and are planning to implement in the future.
We have a customer considered significant (I can’t mention the company name here). Still, as they are huge, there is bureaucracy, which means they prefer us hosting campaign/hot sites on our account, paying through our credit card, and just sending an invoice for them later to pay instead of providing their business credit card.
Unfortunately, depending on the customer level, some details are a deal breaker.
@HallsYeah It all makes sense and I think your feature request is reasonable.
We host client sites with the same approach, for some of the reasons you mention, but also because small businesses in Australia expect to pay fairly low hosting fees.
As an alternative, (albeit not as easy!), if the Netlify API provided the ability to query site usage details reports/emails could be generated as needed.
Thanks so much for this suggestion and thoughtful conversation on the topic! I’ve ensured that our product team has seen it so they can consider building official endpoints and at a higher level, a billing system that is more compatible with agency type work, since that is an important segment for our product to Support.
and what you need to know is that you’ll want to capture that data the day before the end of your billing cycle since the moment the bill cycle ends, is when we’ll start showing “next month’s” data meaning you can’t see last month’s in this format anymore.
It’s not a productized solution, and as the endpoint is undocumented, it could change - but it is possible today to get that data via API.
