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, temporary testing, and scientific computing.

Billing Items

The following table lists billing items of pay-per-use DB instances.

If you want to purchase a DB instance with 2 vCPUs, 8 GB of memory, and 2 nodes, the prices will be displayed as follows (excluding storage and backup space prices).

Figure 1 Example prices

The prices include:

Instance specifications (including vCPUs and memory)

The storage and backup space prices are not included. For details about storage and backup prices, see the Product Pricing Details page of the price calculator.

Billed Usage Period

Pay-per-use DB instance usage is calculated by the second and billed every hour. The billing starts when the DB instance is launched and ends when the DB instance is deleted.

It takes a certain time to create a DB instance. The billing starts from the Completed time on the Instant Tasks page in the task center.

For example, if you purchased a pay-per-use DB instance at 8:45:30 and deleted it at 8:55:30, you were billed for the 600 seconds from 8:45:30 to 8:55:30.

Billing Examples

Suppose you purchased a pay-per-use DB instance with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory at 10:00:30 on April 18, 2023 and deleted the DB instance on at 10:45:46 on the same day. The DB instance with two nodes used 20 GB storage and 50 GB backup space.

You will be billed for all usage periods. GaussDB(for MySQL) instances are billed individually as follows: The prices displayed in the pricing details are 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 2 shows the billing calculation.

When you delete a DB instance, its automated backups are also deleted, but its manual backups are still retained and will incur additional costs.

The price in the figure is for reference only. The actual prices are subject to GaussDB(for MySQL) Pricing Details.

However, the amount due is truncated to the 2nd decimal place. The third and later decimal places are referred to as the truncated amounts.

From June 2021, the amounts before bill generation are no longer truncated. Only the total amount shown in the monthly bill is rounded off to the 2nd decimal place.

• On the Billing > Bills > Bills page of the Billing Center, the total amount in a monthly bill is slightly higher because the amounts are no longer truncated to the 2nd decimal place.
• On the Billing > Bills > Bills page of the Billing Center, the amounts shown under Details By Account are rounded off. Therefore, there may be some discrepancies with the amounts shown in the monthly bill. To view the exact amounts (accurate to the 8th decimal place), customers can export the monthly bill in XLSX or CSV format.

Figure 2 Total price for a pay-per-use DB instance in CN-Hong Kong

Price Change After Specification Change

If you change the instance specifications of a pay-per-use DB instance, the original order will become invalid and a new order will be placed. You will be billed based on the new instance specifications.

If you change the instance specifications within a given hour, multiple records will be generated. Different records record the billing for different instance specifications.

Suppose you purchased a pay-per-use DB instance (2 vCPUs | 8 GB) at 9:00:00 and changed the instance specifications to 4 vCPUs | 16 GB at 9:30:00. Two billing records were generated from 9:00:00 to 10:00:00.

• DB instance (2 vCPUs | 8 GB) usage from 9:00:00 to 9:30:00
• DB instance (4 vCPUs | 16 GB) usage from 9:30:00 to 10:00:00

Impacts of Arrears

Figure 3 shows the statuses a pay-per-use DB instance can have throughout its lifecycle. After a DB instance is purchased, it enters the valid period and runs normally during this period. If your account goes into arrears, the DB instance enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 3 Life cycle of a pay-per-use DB instance

Arrears Reminder

The system will bill you for pay-per-use DB instances 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 there is no top-up account with sufficient balance and no other payment method configured to pay for the resources used, your account goes into arrears, and the pay-per-use DB instance enters the grace period. 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 balance current before the grace period expires, the DB instance status turns to Frozen and it enters a retention period. You cannot perform any operations on a pay-per-use DB instance in the Frozen status.

If you do not bring your account balance current before the retention period ends, your instance will be released, and data cannot be restored.

• During the retention period, you cannot access and use your DB instance but data in the DB instance will 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 DB instance. The grace period for Huawei Cloud International website is 15 days.
• For details about top-up, see Topping Up an Account.