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Enable transparent pricing (experimental)

Before you start

  • Make sure you read our one of our Try NLX guides
  • Make sure that you have NLX management running
  • Make sure that you have an inway and you are offering a service

Introduction

This guide will explain how NLX can be used to implement a transparent pricing model for your services. You can create a subscription model, a pay per use model or a hybrid model. This feature is introduced, as a working example to aid the study, brainstorm, discussion and thinking process about cost of ownership of (public) data vs cost of use of (public) data.

Legally binding contract vs transparancy only

This feature is not intended as part of an automatic system where legally binding contracts are easily made. You, as a service owner, could use it to inform potential users about the costs but you would still need a separate contact in place to start billing. The time to do that, is before granting access to your service.

Setup the transaction-log database

Before you can use the finance page make sure to enable the transaction logs. If you followed the Try NLX guide for Docker the transaction log is enabled by default. If you followed the Try NLX guide for Helm make sure you executed the step Setup the Transaction Log.

Currently, we only support one database for all transaction logs.

Enable the transaction-log

The transaction log is currently only used to generate the finance report.

To enable the transaction-log, start NLX Management with --transaction-log-dsn flag, or set the TRANSACTION_LOG_DSN environment variable.

Setup a price for a service

  • Start NLX Management and navigate to your services
  • Click on the service you want to add pricing for and click "Edit"
  • Scroll down to "Pricing" (kosten), tick "This is a paid service" (Dit is een betaalde service) and add the desired pricing information
  • After submitting the form you'll see the pricing information in the service detail pane

Agree to the cost when requesting access to a service

  • When you want to use a service and request access, a confirmation dialog is shown containing the revenue model entered by the service owner
  • Confirmation and thereby accepting these costs does not represent a legally binding contact.

Use NLX Management to create an export

  • Use the main navigation to go to "Finances"
  • Click the export button