Overview

There are yearly/monthly and pay-per-use billing modes to meet your requirements.

Yearly/Monthly is a prepaid billing. You pay in advance for a subscription term, and in exchange, you get a discounted rate. The longer the subscription term, the bigger the discount. Yearly/Monthly billing is a good option for long-term, stable clusters.
Pay-per-use is a postpaid billing. You pay as you go and just pay for what you use. Huawei Cloud UCS resource usage is calculated by the second but billed every hour. This mode allows you to flexibly adjust resource usage. You neither need to prepare for resources in advance, nor end up with excessive or insufficient preset resources. Pay-per-use billing is a good option for small-scale clusters.

Table 1 compares the two billing modes.

**Table 1** Billing modes
Billing Mode	Yearly/Monthly	Pay-per-use
Payment	Prepaid	Postpaid
Billing Method	Billed by the subscription term you purchase	Calculated by the second but billed every hour
Billed Items	Clusters managed by UCS	Clusters managed by UCS
Billing for Stopped Clusters	After a yearly/monthly subscription expires, you will be billed for subsequently used resources on a pay-per-use basis. Operations, such as cluster deregistration, are not affected.	You pay for what you use. The billing starts when a cluster is connected and ends after the cluster is deregistered.
Billing Mode Change	Yearly/Monthly cannot be changed to pay-per-use. However, if the yearly/monthly subscription quota is reached or the yearly/monthly subscription ends, pay-per-use billing automatically takes effect.	After you purchase a package, the billing mode changes to yearly/monthly.
Specification Change	You cannot change package specifications. If you wish to connect a cluster whose resource usage exceeds the package quota, the excess usage will be billed on a pay-per-use basis.	Pay-per-use billing is based on the cluster scale.
Application Scenarios	A cost-effective option for scenarios where the service usage duration is predictable. Recommended for services expected to be used for a long-term.	Recommended when the service demands are likely to fluctuate and you want more flexibility.