Pay-per-Use Billing

Application Scenarios

Pay-per-use is suitable for applications or services that require uninterrupted, short-term, sudden spikes, or unpredictable usage.

Billed Items

• OCR is charged based on the number of API calls. For billing details, see Price Calculator.
• Only successful API calls are counted, where a 2xx status code indicates a successful call, and failed calls are not charged.

Billed Usage Period

Pay-per-use OCR resources are charged based on the number of successful calls, with fees settled every hour on the hour (UTC+08:00).

For example, if you subscribe to the pay-per-use Passport OCR at 08:45:30 and make 50 successful calls before unsubscribing from it at 08:55:30, the billing cycle will be from 08:00:00 to 09:00:00. Fees will be charged for the period between 08:45:30 and 08:55:30, with a total of 50 charges for the billing cycle.

Billing Examples

Suppose you subscribed to Passport OCR based on pay-per-use billing at 09:59:30 on April 18, 2023, and unsubscribed from it at 10:45:46 on the same day. During this period, you successfully called the API for 100 times.

• The first billing cycle is from 09:00:00 to 10:00:00, and the billing duration within the cycle is from 09:59:30 to 10:00:00, during which the API is successfully called for 5 times.
• The second billing cycle is from 10:00:00 to 11:00:00, and the billing duration within the cycle is from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46, during which the API is successfully called for 95 times.

The fee is settled on the hour (UTC+08:00). You need to pay for each billing cycle.

Impact of Arrears

Figure 1 shows the statuses a pay-per-use OCR API can have throughout its lifecycle. During the billing cycle, resources operate normally, which is the validity period after purchase. If your account goes into arrears due to automatic deduction of pay-per-use OCR resources, your account will enter an arrears state, and resources will gradually enter a grace period and retention period.

Figure 1 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use OCR API

Arrears Reminder

The system will deduct fees from pay-per-use resources after each billing cycle. When your account goes into arrears, we will notify the creator of the Huawei Cloud account via email, SMS, or internal message.

Impacts of Arrears

If your account is insufficient to pay your amount due, your account goes into arrears and your resource enters the grace period. After arrears, pay-per-use resources will not immediately stop operating, but will enter a grace period. You need to pay for the costs incurred during the grace period, which can be viewed under Billing Center > Overview. Huawei Cloud will automatically deduct the arrears amount when you top up your account.

If you still have not paid the arrears during the grace period, you will enter the retention period, and the resource status will change to Frozen. You will not be able to perform any operations on pay-per-use resources in the retention period.

If you do not bring your account balance current before the retention period ends, data stored in OCR will be deleted or released and cannot be recovered.

NOTE:

• Huawei Cloud defines different grace periods and retention periods for different tiers of customers. You can check your tier by logging in to the management console and choosing Basic Information under your username in the upper right corner.

• For details about top-up, see Topping Up an Account.