Pay-per-Use Billing

Application Scenarios

Pay-per-use billing is suitable for applications or services that cannot be interrupted but have unpredictable or sudden traffic surges, such as flash sale activities on e-commerce platforms, temporary testing, and scientific computing.

Billing Items

The following billing items support pay-per-use billing.

If you purchase the professional edition SecMaster with one quota, as well as large screen, security data collection, security data retention, security analysis, and security orchestration, and select the pay-per-use billing mode, at the bottom of the SecMaster purchase page, you can view the fee details.

Figure 1 Example price

The price includes:

• Professional edition: the fees for the professional edition and the quota you specify.
• Large screen - security situation metrics: the fee for SecMaster large screen.
• Security analysis package: the fee for security analysis data volume you use.
• Security data collection: the fee for the security data collected for you.
• Security data retention: the fee for the total volume of logs stored for you.
• Security orchestration: the fee for playbook execution times.

Billing Period

Pay-per-use SecMaster resources are billed by second. Bills are settled on each integer hour (UTC+ 08:00). After the settlement is complete, a new billing period starts. The billing starts from the time when SecMaster is purchased, and ends at the time when pay-per-use billing is disabled.

For example, if you purchase a pay-per-use SecMaster edition (Quota: 1) at 8:45:30, and delete it at 8:55:00, the billing period is from 8:00:00 to 9:00:00. Fees are generated for the duration from 8:45:30 to 8:55:30, and the billing duration is 600 seconds.

Billing Examples

Assume that you purchased the pay-per-use professional edition SecMaster (Quota: 1) and the value-added package that includes large screen, security data collection, security data retention, security analysis, and security orchestration at 09:59:30 on June 08, 2024, and deleted them at 10:45:46 on June 08, 2024. During the billing period, you used SecMaster to complete 1 GB/per day of security analysis, to execute 500 times of security orchestration, to collect 5 GB/day of logs, and to store 100 GB logs. The billing periods of service edition + quota and large screen are as follows:

• The first billing period is from 9:00:00 to 10:00:00. Fees are generated from 9:59:30 to 10:00:00. The billing duration is 30 seconds within the period.
• The second billing period is from 10:00:00 to 11:00:00. Fees are generated from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46. The billing duration is 2,746 seconds within the period.

You need to pay for each billing period, and SecMaster resources are billed individually. The billing formula is shown in Table 2. The price of a resource listed in the product pricing details is per hour, so divide it by 3,600 to obtain the price for each second.

Figure 2 shows how the price is calculated.

Figure 2 Pricing example of pay-per-use SecMaster

Impact on Billing After Specification Changes

If you change the quota after a pay-per-use purchase, a new order will be generated based on the new price. The old order automatically becomes invalid.

If you change the quota within an hour after a purchase, multiple billing records will be generated. Different records record the billing for different specifications.

For example, if you purchase the SecMaster professional edition with quota set to one at 9:00:00 and increase the quota to two at 9:30:00, two pieces of billing records will be generated for the duration between 9:00:00 and 10:00:00.

• The first billing record is for the professional edition and the quota of one for the duration from 09:00:00 to 09:30:00.
• The second billing record is for the professional edition and the quota of two for the duration from 09:30:00 to 10:00:00.

Impact of Arrears

Figure 3 describes the status of pay-per-use SecMaster resources in different periods. After you purchase SecMaster resources, the period during which the resources run properly within the billing cycle is the validity period. If your account is in arrears due to failed payments for the pay-per-use SecMaster resources, the resources enter the grace period and then retention period.

Figure 3 SecMaster resource lifecycle

Arrears notifications

The system deducts fees from your account balance for pay-per-use resources at the end of each billing cycle. If your account is in arrears, we will notify you by email, SMS, or internal message.

Arrears impacts

Your account may fall into arrears if it cannot cover the pay-per-use fees for resources. However, your pay-per-use resources will not be stopped immediately. There will be a grace period. You need to pay the pay-per-use resource fees incurred during the grace period. To view the fees, go to the Billing Center > Overview page. The system will charge the fees once you top up your account.

If you do not pay the arrears within the grace period, the resource 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 off the arrears within the retention period, your SecMaster resources will be released, and data will be lost.