When you sign up for Fanatical Support for AWS, Rackspace establishes one or more AWS accounts for you and becomes your reseller of AWS services. This means that a consolidated Rackspace bill provides all billing of both infrastructure and management fees, and you do not have to maintain a direct payment relationship with AWS. We automatically bill the credit card you provided when signing up for your Rackspace account for both your AWS infrastructure and management fees, as described in the following sections.

Billing Currency

Our default pricing and billing currency is US Dollars (USD). However, when you sign up, you can choose to be billed in Australian Dollars (AUD), Canadian Dollar (CAD), Euro (EUR), and British Pound Sterling (GBP). Customers that choose these non-USD billing options should be aware of the following:

  • All pricing (AWS infrastructure and management fees) remain in USD.
  • We convert the bill from USD to AUD/CAD/EUR/GBP at monthly billing processing time by using a recent spot exchange rate.
  • Non-USD billing incurs a premium: 1% for customers billed using a credit card, 2% for customers billed through an invoice. We add this to the spot exchange rate.
  • The invoice shows the exchange rate.
  • CloudHealth, Waypoint, and Usage Details show pre-converted costs in USD. The invoice shows costs in AUD/CAD/EUR/GBP.
  • You cannot change the billing currency on existing accounts.

Billing cycles

AWS bills for all infrastructure on a calendar month basis. AWS charges for the previous month’s usage typically finalize by the 10th day of each month. After AWS finalizes the charges, we add both infrastructure and support charges to your Rackspace account, and they appear on your next Rackspace bill. Each line item includes the month in which you incurred the charges. The system creates your Rackspace bill on the 15th of each month if you signed up for a FAWS account after July 6, 2017. If you signed up before July 6, 2017, or are using an account originally created for the Rackspace Public Cloud, we bill you based on the anniversary date you created the account.

Financial benefits of your Rackspace account

Your Rackspace account is the top-level container that contains one or more AWS accounts. When aggregating the usage to generate a bill at the Rackspace account level, you receive the following benefits:

  • Favorable Reserved Instance allocation.
  • Tiering of usage across all accounts for AWS services provides tiered pricing. For example, if S3 has a 0-10 TB storage tier and a 10-20 TB storage tier and you have one AWS account which uses 8 TB and another which uses 3 TB, your overall usage rates as a combined 11 TB.

Monthly service fees

We calculate your monthly service fees by pooling the AWS infrastructure charges from all of your AWS accounts at the same service level. If the AWS infrastructure charges are greater than $30, we assess a monthly service fee and proportionally distribute it to each of your AWS accounts at that service level.

For example, if you have two AWS accounts, one with $45,000 in AWS infrastructure charges and the other with $30,000 in AWS infrastructure charges, your monthly service fee would be $25,000 based on your combined AWS infrastructure charge of $75,000.

During your first month with any AWS accounts at a specific service level, we prorate the monthly service fee for the remainder of the month based on your signup date unless you make any Reserved Instance purchases during that month. If you do make a Reserved Instance purchase, we remove the proration as the service fees paid during your first month cover our services for the length of the reserved instance reservation. Note that we base proration on AWS account signup date and not the date AWS infrastructure charges reach more than $30. For example, if you signed up for your AWS account on March 15th but did not start using resources in your account until April 5th, we charge you for a full month of service fees for April.

Usage

The Usage page in the Rackspace Technology Customer Portal provides you with a mid-month view of your charges and an estimate of your full month’s charges, typically updated a few times per day, along with historical usage from previous months. You can use this information to avoid unexpected AWS infrastructure charges. To access the report, select the Usage link in the primary navigation.

Due to our Account Defaults and associated management tooling, each AWS account that you provision has approximately $5-10 of monthly infrastructure charges, regardless of whether you provision any additional AWS resources.

Viewing your invoices

To view your invoices, log in to the Rackspace Technology Customer Portal and click the Billing link toward the top right of the page.

The primary account holder receives an email when we process a payment, indicating that a new invoice is available for review.

Tagging

Rackspace provides detailed views of your AWS billing data by resource tags. The views include only tags with a key from the following list (case-sensitive):

  • BusinessUnit
  • Group
  • Department
  • CostCenter
  • Application
  • Environment
  • Project
  • Owner
  • Service
  • Cluster
  • Role
  • Customer
  • Version
  • Billing1
  • Billing2
  • Billing3
  • Billing4
  • Billing5

We also include the following AWS-generated tags in the detailed views of your AWS billing data:

  • aws:autoscaling:groupName
  • aws:cloudformation:logical-id
  • aws:cloudformation:stack-id
  • aws:cloudformation:stack-name

While you can use tags beyond the preceding list of tags to identify your resources for other reasons, we do not include those other tags in the detailed views of your billing data.

Modifying your payment method

If you need to update the credit card or ACH (eCheck - United States only) details you have on file, log in to the Rackspace Technology Customer Portal and click the Billing link near the upper-right corner of the page. From there, find the link to update your payment details.