Pay-per-use Billing
Pay-per-use billing means you pay nothing up front and are not tied into any contract or commitment. This section describes billing rules of pay-per-use GeminiDB Mongo instances.
Application Scenarios
Pay-per-use billing is good for short-term, bursty, or unpredictable workloads that cannot tolerate any interruptions, such as applications for e-commerce flash sales, temporary testing, and scientific computing.
Billing Items
You are billed for the following items on a pay-per-use basis.
Billing Item |
Description |
---|---|
Instance specifications |
vCPUs and memory |
Storage |
Instance storage space, which is billed hourly on a pay-per-use basis. |
Backup storage |
GeminiDB Mongo API provides free backup storage equal to the amount of storage you purchased. After the free backup storage is used up, additional usage will incur bills based on the backup storage pricing details. These fees are settled by the hour. If it has been used less than one hour, you will be billed based on the actual duration. |
(Optional) Public network bandwidth |
GeminiDB Mongo instances are accessible from public networks, and you are billed for the generated public network traffic, but not for private network traffic. |
If you want to purchase a 3-node (specifications of each node: 4 vCPUs | 16 GB) GeminiDB Mongo instance with 100 GB of storage space. At the bottom of the page for buying an instance, price details (excluding the backup storage fee) will be displayed.

The price includes:
- Instance specifications (including vCPUs and memory)
- Selected storage space

The backup space fee is not included. For details about the backup price, see Product Pricing Details.
Billing Cycle
Pay-per-use instance usage is calculated by the second and priced by the hour (GMT+8). After the bill is generated, a new billing cycle starts. The billing starts when the GeminiDB Mongo instance is created and ends when the instance is deleted.

It takes a certain time to create an instance. The billing starts from the time when the instance is successfully created. You can view the two time points on the Basic Information page. You can view the time when the instance is created beside the Created field.
For example, if you buy a pay-per-use GeminiDB Mongo instance at 8:45:30 and deleted it at 8:55:30, you are billed for the 600 seconds from 8:45:30 to 8:55:30. The billing items include compute resources (vCPUs and nodes), storage, and backup storage.
Billing Examples
Assume that you bought a pay-per-use 3-node instance with 4 vCPUs, 16 GB of memory, 100 GB of storage, and 110 GB of backup storage (100 GB for free) at 09:59:30 on April 18 and deleted the instance at 10:45:46 on April 18, 2023. The billing items include compute resources (vCPUs and nodes) and storage.
- Usage of 30 seconds from 9:59:30 to 10:00:00
- Usage of 2,746 seconds from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46
- The free backup storage is used from 10:00:00 to 10:45:00.
- 10 GB of backup storage is billed for 46 seconds from 10:45:00 to 10:45:46.
The price displayed in the pricing details is per hour, so you need to divide it by 3,600 to obtain the price for each second and then multiply the per-second price by the total number of seconds. GeminiDB Mongo instances are billed individually as follows.
Resource |
Formula |
Unit Price |
---|---|---|
Compute resources (including vCPUs and nodes) |
Unit price of instance specifications x Required duration |
See the estimated price of a cluster instance in GeminiDB Price Calculator. |
Storage |
Storage unit price x Required duration |
See the estimated price of a cluster instance with specified storage in GeminiDB Price Calculator. |
Backup storage |
Backup storage unit price x Required duration x (Backup storage – Storage) (GB)
NOTE:
The billing duration indicates how long the storage exceeding a free quota was used. |
See the estimated price of a cluster instance with specified backup storage in GeminiDB Price Calculator. |
Public network traffic |
Tiered billing by fixed bandwidth
|
For details, see the estimated bandwidth price in ECS Price Calculator or EIP Price Calculator. |
Figure 2 shows how the total price is calculated.

The prices in the following figure are for reference only. For the actual prices, see GeminiDB Price Calculator.
If the price is not an integer number, it is rounded off to the nearest two decimal places. If the rounded price is less than USD0.01, USD0.01 will be displayed.
Impact on Billing After Specification Changes
If you change the specifications of a pay-per-use instance, the original order will become invalid and a new order will be placed. You will be billed based on the new specifications.
If you change instance specifications within a given hour, multiple records will be generated. Different records record the billing for different specifications.
For example, if you buy a pay-per-use instance with 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory at 9:00:00 and upgraded it to 8 vCPUs and 32 GB memory at 9:30:00, two billing records are generated between 9:00:00 and 10:00:00:
- 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory from 9:00:00 to 9:30:00
- 8 vCPUs and 32 GB of memory from 9:30:00 to 10:00:00
Impact of Arrears
Figure 3 shows the statuses of a pay-per-use GeminiDB Mongo instance throughout its lifecycle. After a GeminiDB Mongo instance is purchased, it enters the valid period and runs normally during this period. If your account goes into arrears, the instance enters a grace period and then a retention period.
Arrears reminder
The system will bill you for pay-per-use resources after each billing cycle ends. If your account goes into arrears, the system will send an email, SMS message, or in-app message to the one who created the Huawei Cloud account.
Impact
When your account falls into arrears due to automatic fee deduction for the pay-per-use GeminiDB Mongo instance, your account will be marked as in arrears, and the instance will enter the grace period. After you top up your account, Huawei Cloud will bill you for expenditures generated during the grace period. You can view the charges on the Billing Center > Overview page.
If you do not pay the arrears within the grace period, your instance enters the retention period and its status changes to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on the instance in the retention period.
If you do not pay the arrears within the retention period, your instance will be released, and data will be lost.

- During the retention period, you cannot access or use your instance but the data stored in it can be retained. The retention period for Huawei Cloud International website is 15 days.
- During the grace period, you can access and use only some resources of your instance. The grace period for Huawei Cloud International website is 15 days.
- For details about top-up, see Topping Up an Account.
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