Extneral Identities link subscriptions : MAU billing model

Question

I have a requirement to change Billing model for external identities to MAU(monthy active users). I have multiple subscriptions within the tenant .
I tried to link it to subscriptions but it's allowing only one subscription .

Please suggest me how to link all the subscriptions in a tenant to MAU . and if i link it to just one subscription , will the MAU model applicable to just 1 subscription?

• Do i need to unassign the Premium P2 licenses already assigned to the external identities once the subscription is linked to External Identities. if so can you please let me know how to do this

Answer 1

@NehaBameta-3476

Thank you for your query . As far as I understand , you have multiple azure subscriptions associated with your tenant and you are trying to convert to MAU billing model for your external identities . You have mentioned that you tried to link it to more than one subscriptions but the system only allows you to link your Azure AD tenant to only one subscription . This is because at a time MAU billing can be done only on one azure subscription for all your external identities not on multiple subscriptions for the same external identity scenario . Imagine if you could link your external identity scenario with multiple azure subscription then it would technically mean that you are being charge twice for same guest user in two different azure subscriptions that you own. Hence this is by design and only one subscription is charged for external identities guest access.

There are three different scenarios for External identities generally. One where you have the users present as a guest within your tenant for B2B collaboration , second where you setup a mutual two way trust between your tenant and another tenant and the other tenants user's do not need to be added as guest within your tenant called B2B direct connect scenario and the third one where you create a separate Azure AD B2C tenant altogether to serve your application to general consumers.

As per the information provided by you , you seem to be using B2B scenarios where you have assigned P2 licenses in the 1:5 ratio which was the per-authentication model for external Identities. In case of B2B external Identities you can go to the portal and update the subscription setting as shown below. Please read more here.

As you can see, once it got linked, a B2B directory object of type "guest usage" gets created within the resource group that was selected.

You should definitely unassign any P2 licenses that you may have assigned to the guest users within your tenant because its not needed anymore . For the first 50000 monthly active external users you would be able to use all the capabilities in your tenant (P1 and P2 both ) as long as you have P1/P2 licenses associated with your tenant . You can unassign the P2 licenses from the portal directly . Since all these users would be guest users in B2B scenario, so you can search for them by adding Usertype=Guest filter in Azure Portal and then removing the P2 license. The easiest way is to go to M365 portal which has a separate section for guests where you can remove the licenses .

If you are using the B2C scenario then also you can only associate/link the B2C tenant with one azure subscription . Since you are using P2 licenses , its highly unlikely that you would be using B2C as far as I can think so you do not need to worry about this , however you can check the linked article in order to understand more about B2C MAU billing which is same as B2B scenarios described above.

Hope the information helped. Should you have any further queries or if we misunderstood any of your queries , please reply in comments and we will continue to help you further. In case the information is helpful , please do accept the post as answer which will improve the relevancy of the content on this thread and improve discoverability of the answer for the community members.

Thank you .

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