Enterprise Customer Billing Overview

Billing Insights

As an enterprise customer, you will be invoiced on certain cadences in line with your Master Services Agreement (MSA) on file with Particle. Billing activities are initiated upon certain events that occur over the lifetime of your contract. There are four main activities that initiate billing: hardware shipments, hosted service minimums, device overages, data overages and support service minimums. The frequency of your invoices is defined in the MSA and are subject to certain requirements, but are set to monthly, quarterly or annual billing cycles. 

Hardware Billing

When a committed purchase order (PO) is submitted and the Particle Team fulfills your order, the same day the units leave our warehousing facility and are en route to you, an invoice will be created and emailed to the accounts payable contact on file. 

 Our accounts receivable department will begin sending reminder emails to you within 1 week of the due date. It is important to communicate when payment has been made or if questions arise by contacting accounts-receivable@particle.io. 

 The customer is required to purchase a set number of devices each contract year. If the number of devices ordered within a given year does not meet the minimum purchase quantity, we will reconcile your account and generate an invoice for the difference. 

Hosted Service Billing Structure

Hosted Service, as defined in your MSA, includes “certain tools, application

programming interfaces ("APIs"), software development kits, access codes, connectivity standards, and protocols”. A device is “billable” when the device is claimed (Wi-Fi) or the sim status is “active” (cellular) within a given month, regardless of how many times the device accesses the Hosted Service. For cellular devices, if a sim is in the active state at any point in a given month, it will consume a device month. All Wi-Fi devices that are claimed within the given month, will consume a device month. 

 Beginning on the effective date of your contract, enterprise customers will be allotted a certain number of device months within each contract year (“annual pool”). Each month your consumption data is reviewed and the number of billable devices is calculated and tracked month over month. If the accumulation of billable devices each month is under your allotment for the year, there will be no additional fees included on your monthly invoice. If or when you consume all the device months allotted in a given year, there will be a “device overage fee” for each additional billable device until the contract year has ended. At the beginning of the next contract year, a new annual pool is created which will be drawn against month over month. Please note that if your effective date is in the middle of the month, your Hosted Service minimum will be prorated. 

 If you are utilizing a cellular connected Particle device, each device includes a cellular data plan. The amount of data included with each device is specified in your MSA. Month over month your data is tracked and reviewed against your annual pool of allotted megabytes (MB). If or when your devices consume all the data within the annual pool, there will be a “data overage fee” for each additional MB used until the contract year has ended. 

 If you are utilizing a Wi-Fi connected device, there are no charges for data as part of your hosted services billing.  

 Hosted service minimums will be billed in accordance with the payment schedule in your MSA. You should expect to receive your invoice by the second week of each month. Device or data overages will be billed monthly, in arrears. 

Support Billing

Particle will provide support to customers in accordance with the MSA on file. Support service minimums are invoiced at the beginning of each contract year. If Hosted Services device overages occur, support overages will be equal to 15% overage fee. The additional support overage will be included on your monthly Hosted Service invoice.