Pay-per-Use

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 Cycle

The usage of pay-per-use MAS resources is calculated by hour and settled every hour (UTC+8). Once settlement is complete, a new billing cycle starts. Billing starts when a MAS instance is created and ends when the instance is deleted.

Billing Example

Assume you purchased a pay-per-use MAS instance at 09:30:00 on Oct 16, 2023 and then deleted it at 11:00:00 on Oct 16, 2023. The following usage periods will be billed:

• The first billing period is 9:00:00 to 10:00:00. You will be billed for 0.5 hours from 09:30:00 to 10:00:00.
• The second billing period is 10:00:00 to 11:00:00. You will be billed for 1 hour from 10:00:00 to 11:00:00.

You need to pay for each billing period. The billing formula is as follows: Unit price of instance specifications x Billing duration. For details, see Pricing Details.

The unit price of this pay-per-use instance is USD3/hour. The total fee for the two billing periods is 3 x (0.5 + 1) = USD4.5.

The prices are for reference only. Actual prices are subject to those in MAS Pricing Details.

Impact of Arrears

Figure 1 describes the status of a pay-per-use MAS instance in each stage. After you purchase a MAS instance, the instance is running properly within the billing period, this period is the validity period. When the automatic billing of a pay-per-use MAS instance leads to arrears on your account, the account status turns to arrears, and your MAS instance enters the grace period and retention period accordingly.

Figure 1 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use MAS resource

Arrears alert

The system will deduct fees for pay-per-use resources at the end of each billing cycle. You will be notified by email, SMS, or internal messages when your account is in arrears.

Impact of arrears

When your account is in arrears due to automatic fee deduction for pay-per-use MAS instances, the account status turns to arrears. Pay-per-use resources are not stopped immediately. You need to pay the fees of your pay-per-use resource incurred during the grace period. To view the fees, go to the Billing Center > Overview page. Huawei Cloud will deduct the fees after you top up your account.

If you do not pay the arrears within the grace period, the instance enters the retention period and its status turns to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on pay-per-use resources in the retention period.

If you do not pay the arrears within the retention period, your MAS instance will be released, and data will be lost.

• Both the grace and retention periods are 15 days.

• For details about how to make repayment, see Making Repayments (Postpaid Direct Customers).