Yearly/Monthly Billing

If you expect to use resources for a longer period, you can save money by selecting yearly/monthly billing. Yearly/Monthly is a prepaid billing mode. You pay in advance for using a cloud service, and in exchange, you get a discounted rate. This topic describes the billing rules for yearly/monthly bandwidth packages.

Application Scenarios

If you want to ensure resource stability over a certain period of time, yearly/monthly billing is a good choice for the following types of workloads:

Long-term workloads with stable resource requirements, such as official websites, online malls, and blogs.
Long-term projects, such as scientific research projects and large-scale events.
Workloads with predictable traffic bursts, for example, e-commerce promotions or festivals.
Workloads with high data security requirements

Billed Item

Cloud connections are free. To enable high-quality communications across regions, you need to purchase yearly/monthly bandwidth packages. If your VPCs are in the same region, there is no need to buy a bandwidth package.

Bandwidth packages are billed by the term your purchase.

**Table 1** Billed item
Billed Item	Description
Bandwidth package	Used for communications between regions within a geographic region or across geographic regions. The bandwidth billing option is By bandwidth.

Billed Usage Period

A yearly/monthly bandwidth package is billed for the purchased duration. The billing starts when you activated or renewed the subscription, and ends at 23:59:59 of the expiry date.

For example, if you purchased a one-month bandwidth package on March 08, 2023, 15:50:04, the billed usage period is from March 08, 2023, 15:50:04 to April 08, 2023, 23:59:59.

Billing Example

Assume that you purchased a one-month, 150-Mbit/s bandwidth package at 15:50:04 on March 8, 2023 for communications within the Chinese mainland and renewed the subscription for one more month before the initial subscription expired. That would include two usage periods:

March 08, 2023, 15:50:04 to April 08, 2023, 23:59:59
April 8, 2023, 23:59:59 to May 8, 2023, 23:59:59

You will be billed for both usage periods. Table 2 shows the billing formula.

**Table 2** Billing formula
Resource	Billing	Unit Price
Bandwidth package	Tiered pricing is used based on the bandwidth size.	Cloud Connect pricing details

Figure 1 shows how the total price is calculated.

Figure 1 Example bandwidth package billing

The prices in the figure are just examples. The actual prices are displayed on Cloud Cloud Pricing Details.

Price Change After Specification Change

If the specifications of a yearly/monthly bandwidth package no longer meet your needs, you can change the specifications on the console. The system will recalculate the price and either bill or refund you the difference.

If you upgrade the bandwidth package, you need to pay the difference in price.
If you downgrade the bandwidth package, Huawei Cloud will refund you the difference.

Assume that you purchased a one-month 150-Mbit/s bandwidth package for communications within the Chinese mainland (billed by bandwidth) on April 8, 2023 and changed the bandwidth to 200 Mbit/s on April 18, 2023. The price of the original bandwidth is $3,767.5 USD, and the price of the new bandwidth is $4,347 USD. The price difference will be calculated as follows:

Price difference = New bandwidth price × Remaining period - Original bandwidth price × Remaining period

The remaining period is the remaining days of each calendar month divided by the maximum number of days in each calendar month. In this example, the remaining period is 0.6581.

12 (Remaining days in April)/30 (Days in April) + 8 (Remaining days in May)/31 (Days in May) = 0.6581

Price difference = $4,347 USD x 0.6581 – $3767.5 USD x 0.6581 = $377.7181 USD

For more information, see Pricing of a Changed Specification.

Impact of Expiration

Figure 2 shows the statuses a yearly/monthly bandwidth package can go through throughout its lifecycle. After a bandwidth package is purchased, it enters the valid period and runs normally during this period. If the bandwidth package is not renewed after it expires, before being deleted, it first enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 2 Lifecycle of a yearly/monthly bandwidth package

Expiration Reminder

The system will send you a reminder (by email, SMS, or in-app message) 7 days before a yearly/monthly bandwidth package expires to remind you to renew the subscription.

Impact of Expiration

If the yearly/monthly bandwidth package is not renewed after it expires, it changes to the Expired state and enters a grace period.
If the yearly/monthly bandwidth package is not renewed after the grace period ends, its status turns to Frozen and it enters a retention period. You cannot perform any operations on the bandwidth package while it is in the retention period.
If the yearly/monthly bandwidth package is not renewed by the time the retention period ends, the bandwidth package will be released and data cannot be restored.