Pay-per-Use Billing

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 and temporary testing.

Billed Items

Service edition: the purchased service edition. Only CFW of professional edition supports the pay-per-use billing mode.

Actual traffic (GB): total traffic generated during service usage.

Billed Usage Period

Pay-per-use CFW resources are billed by second. Bills are settled on each integer hour (UTC+ 08:00). After the settlement is complete, a new billing period starts. The billing starts when the CFW instance is launched and ends when the instance is deleted.

It takes a certain time to launch a CFW instance. The billing starts from the time when the CFW instance is successfully created.

For example, if you purchased a pay-per-use CFW of the professional edition at 8:45:30 and deleted it at 8:55:00, you are billed for the 600 seconds from 8:45:30 to 8:55:30.

Billing Examples

Suppose you purchased a pay-per-use CFW of the professional edition on April 18, 2024, 9:59:30 and deleted it on April 18, 2024, 10:45:46. During the usage period, a maximum of 10 GB traffic was generated. The billing resources include the service edition (professional edition) and the generated traffic (10 GB). Two usage periods will be billed:

• Usage of 30 seconds from 9:59:30 to 10:00:00 (between 9:00:00 and 10:00:00)
• Usage of 2,746 seconds from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46 (between 10:00:00 and 11:00:00)

You need to pay for each billing cycle. Each resource is billed separately. For details, see Formula. The prices 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 multiple the per-second price by the total number of seconds.

Figure 1 shows the billing calculation.

The prices in the figure are examples only. The actual prices are those displayed on CFW Pricing Details.

Figure 1 Total price for a pay-per-use CFW instance

Impact of Arrears

Figure 2 shows the statuses a pay-per-use CFW can have throughout its lifecycle. After a CFW is purchased, it enters the validity period and runs normally during this period. If your account goes into arrears, the CFW instance enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 2 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use CFW

Arrears Reminder

The system will bill you for pay-per-use resources after each billing cycle ends. If your account is in arrears, we will notify you by email, SMS, or in-app message.

Impact of Arrears

Your account may fall into arrears if it cannot cover the bill you need to pay. In this case, relevant cloud services will not be stopped immediately. There will be a grace period for pay-per-use resources. You are still responsible for expenditures generated during the grace period. You can view the charges on the Billing Center > Overview page and pay any past due balance as needed.

If you do not bring your account current before the grace period expires, CFW resources turn to Frozen and enter a retention period. You cannot perform any operations on a pay-per-use CFW resource in the Frozen status.

If you do not bring your account balance current before the retention period ends, your CFW instance and protection configurations will be automatically deleted and data cannot be restored.