Overview

P2C VPN supports the yearly/monthly and pay-per-use billing modes.

Yearly/Monthly is a prepaid billing mode. 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 services.
Pay-per-use is a postpaid billing mode. You pay for the amount of time you use VPN resources or for the amount of traffic you generate. This allows you to adjust resource usage easily. You neither need to prepare for resources in advance, nor end up with excess or insufficient preset resources. This billing mode is a good option for scenarios where there are traffic bursts.

**Table 1** P2C VPN billing modes
Billing Mode	Yearly/Monthly	Pay-per-use (billed by bandwidth)	Pay-per-use (billed by traffic)
Payment	Prepaid Settled by the subscription term you purchase	Postpaid Billed based on your specified EIP bandwidth and usage duration (there is no limit on how much traffic you can use.)	Postpaid Billed based on your specified EIP type and your total amount of traffic leaving the cloud
Billing Cycle	Billed by the subscription term you purchase	Billed by the second and settled every hour	Billed by the second and settled every hour
Billing Item	VPN gateway: Currently, only the specification Professional 1 is supported. The maximum throughput is 300 Mbit/s, and 10 VPN connections are free of charge with the purchase of a VPN gateway by default. You can purchase more VPN connections as required. VPN connection: You are billed at tiered pricing based on the number of VPN connections: 1–10, 11–50, 51–100, and 101–500.	VPN gateway: You are charged for using gateway instances in the period of time you use them. VPN connection: You can purchase connections (sold in units of 1) as required. EIP bandwidth: refers to the outbound bandwidth for traffic sent from a VPC on the cloud to a customer gateway in an on-premises data center. You need to purchase EIP bandwidth only when the network type is public network.	VPN gateway: You are charged for using gateway instances in the period of time you use them. VPN connection: You can purchase connections (sold in units of 1) as required. EIP traffic: You are charged for the traffic generated in every hour, with the billing unit being 1 GB. If less than 1 GB is generated, the fee is calculated based on the actually generated traffic volume. Adjusting the bandwidth does not change the public network traffic price per GB. Only traffic leaving the cloud is billed. Traffic entering the cloud is not billed.
Changing the Billing Mode	The billing mode cannot be changed.
Changing the Quotas	The EIP bandwidth can be increased or decreased. The number of VPN connections can be increased or decreased. The specification of a VPN gateway cannot be changed.	The EIP bandwidth can be increased or decreased. The number of VPN connections cannot be increased or decreased.	The EIP bandwidth can be increased or decreased. NOTE: The bandwidth is used only for rate limiting, so the bandwidth setting does not affect the fee incurred.
Application Scenarios	Recommended for scenarios with predictable usage period Long-term use	Recommended for scenarios with heavy or stable traffic Fluctuating demand for resources	Recommended for scenarios with light or sharply fluctuating traffic Fluctuating demand for resources