Overview
Whether you run a small individual business or are part of a multi-national enterprise, the Sinch account model provides you with the tools to consume Sinch services in dynamic ways. It can be used to manage concerns such as access control and billing.
The Sinch account model is composed of the following four elements: accounts, billing accounts, projects, and subprojects. Account structure can be customized through our APIs, the Sinch Customer Dashboard, or through your Account Manager.
When you sign up on the Sinch Customer Dashboard, a Sinch account and a billing account are automatically created for you. Generally, a Sinch account will not need any adjustments while the billing account may need to be updated with invoicing or credit card information. A project is necessary to use any Sinch product available through the dashboard. Your first project is also created automatically upon account creation. Subprojects are optional.
Here’s a summary of how it works:
Now we’ll dive into how each element works.
Sinch products as resources
Whenever you use Sinch services, you are interacting with a resource. Examples of resources are numbers, messages, calls, and conversations. These resources are either exposed directly through one of our REST APIs or indirectly through one of our applications.
The Sinch account model introduces additional organizational resources such as accounts, billing accounts, projects, and subprojects. These resources may relate to other resources, and together they form a resource hierarchy. The resource hierarchy can be used to mirror your organization's structure to control access to different groups of resources.
Sinch accounts
Your Sinch account is created when you sign up on the Sinch Customer Dashboard. It represents the relationship between your business and Sinch. It ties together all your Sinch services.
The account resource forms the root of the resource hierarchy that relates to your business.
In short, a Sinch account:
- Represents your relationship with Sinch
- Is the root of your resource hierarchy
Billing accounts
When you use Sinch services, you will be incurring charges to a billing account. Billing accounts maintain your account balance and contain your payment information such as name, address, currency type, and tax ID.
A Sinch account may have multiple billing account resources to control how the usage of Sinch services gets billed. This is done by linking the billing account to the projects you want it to pay for.
Billing accounts exist in two flavors: prepaid and postpaid.
- Prepaid billing accounts maintain an account balance that you can easily top up using your preferred billing method.
- Postpaid billing accounts are paid via invoice.
In short, a billing account:
- Collects charges for all different Sinch products and maintains your account balance
- Controls how other resources are billed
- Stores payment information such as name, address, currency type, and tax ID for your business
Example: multiple cost centers
Big Business is a large enterprise with many different departments, of which several are using Sinch services. They want each of these departments to get invoiced separately and can achieve this by creating one billing account per department.
Example: multiple currencies
Dough Generator is an international company that uses Sinch services in multiple different regions. They can pay in the respective local currencies by creating one billing account per region.
Projects
To use the products that Sinch offers, you first need a project. Projects group resources together to simplify managing access and billing. When creating resources associated with one of Sinch's products (such as numbers, messages, calls, and conversations), they are created within the context of a containing project.
A Sinch account may have multiple project resources, typically one per application, environment, or team that is using Sinch services.
In short, a project:
- Groups resources together
- Acts as a boundary for access control
Example: separate teams
Crunch Time is a company with a portfolio of products that use Sinch services. Each product is built by a separate team of developers that want to restrict access to their service configuration. This is achieved by creating a project for each team and inviting the respective team members to that project.
Subprojects
Subprojects are like projects in the sense that they are also a way to group resources together. In fact, they are projects, but with some important distinctions: they do not affect billing and they always belong to a parent project. Instead, they rely on their parent project for billing purposes.
A project may have multiple subproject resources that can be used when there is need for more levels in the resource hierarchy to organize your resources. They can also be used to create new groups of resources easily and dynamically.
In short, a subproject:
- Further refines groups of resources
- Acts as a boundary for access control
- Does not affect billing
- Is useful when you need to create groups of resources dynamically
Example: dynamic projects
Middleman Brokering is a company which uses Sinch services as part of its platform. They have hundreds of clients and are actively adding new ones every day. They want to track how much each of their clients indirectly uses Sinch services. They do this by creating a subproject for each client. They can automate this process since there is no need to configure billing manually for any of the clients.
Summary
In summary, the Sinch account model is designed to give you the tools needed to better organize your products, teams, and projects.
|
Account |
Project |
Subproject |
Billing Account |
|
|
Cardinality |
One per Sinch customer* |
One or more per account |
zero or more per project |
One or more per account |
|
Who is it for |
Any Sinch customer* |
Any Sinch customer* |
Primarily ASPs |
Any Sinch customer* |
|
How to create |
Automatically |
Subprojects API (within Customer Dashboard coming soon!) |
Automatically |
|
|
Purpose |
Unique ID for Sinch customer |
Separate access/usage/billing |
Separate access/usage |
Control balance/invoice/currency. |
|
API key |
None |
None |
None |
*Except customers signed through ASPs
Get started by creating a Sinch Account in the Sinch Customer Dashboard.
