Pay-per-Use Billing

Overview

Pay-per-use billing means you pay nothing up front and are not tied into any contract or commitment.

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 pods on a pay-per-use basis.

**Table 1** Billing items
Billing Item	Description
General-computing	vCPUs and memory are billed on a pay-per-use basis.
General-computing-lite	vCPUs and memory are billed on a pay-per-use basis.

If you plan to create a pod, the price is displayed at the bottom of the page. This price includes the price of the vCPUs and that of the memory.

Figure 1 Example price

Billed Usage Period

The usage duration of pay-per-use pods is calculated by the second but billed every hour. Billing starts when a pod is created and ends when the pod is deleted.

For example, if you purchased a general-computing pod at 08:45:30 and deleted it at 08:55:30, you are billed for the 600 seconds from 8:45:30 to 8:55:30.

Billing Example

Assume that you purchased a pay-per-use general-computing pod (2 vCPUs and 4 GiB of memory) at 9:59:30 on January 1, 2025 and deleted it at 10:45:46 on January 1, 2025. Two usage periods were billed:

First usage period: 30 seconds from 9:59:30 to 10:00:00
Second usage period: 2,746 seconds from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46

You need to pay for each period. Table 2 describes how vCPUs and memory are billed.

**Table 2** vCPU and memory billing
Item	Formula	Unit Price
vCPU	Unit price × Number of vCPUs × Required duration	For details, see CCI Pricing Details.
Memory	Unit price × Memory × Required duration	For details, see CCI Pricing Details.

Impact on Billing After Specifications Change

If you change the specifications of a pay-per-use pod, 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 specifications within a given hour, multiple records will be generated. Different bills record the billing for different specifications.

For example, if you purchased a pay-per-use pod with 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB of memory at 9:00:00 and upgraded the pod specifications to 4 vCPUs and 8 GiB of memory at 9:30:00, the following items were billed:

Usage of 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB of memory from 9:00:00 to 9:30:00
Usage of 4 vCPUs and 8 GiB of memory from 9:30:00 to 10:00:00

Impacts of Arrears

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

Figure 2 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use pod

Arrears Alert

You will be billed for pay-per-use resources after each billing cycle ends. If your account goes into arrears, we will notify you by email, SMS, or in-app message.

Impacts of Arrears

If your account balance is insufficient to pay your amount due, your account goes into arrears. Pay-per-use pods are not stopped immediately. You are still responsible for expenditures generated during the grace period. You can view the expenditures on the Billing Center > Overview page and pay any past due balance as needed.

If you do not pay the arrears within the grace period, your resources will enter the retention period and become frozen. You cannot perform any operations on the pay-per-use resources during this period.

If you do not bring your account current before the retention period ends, the compute resources (vCPUs and memory) will be released and data cannot be restored.