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

Pay-per-use VPN can be billed by bandwidth or traffic. Table 1 lists the billing items in different billing modes.

Billed Duration

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

For example, if you purchased an Enterprise Edition VPN gateway at 08:45:30 and deleted it at 08:55:30 on the same day, you are billed for the 600 seconds from 08:45:30 to 08:55:30.

Billing Example (Billed by Bandwidth)

Compared with Enterprise Edition VPN (billed by bandwidth), Classic VPN (billed by bandwidth) does not support association with an enterprise router and is billed based on the number of connections, instead of being billed by the number of connection groups. The following uses the more complex Enterprise Edition VPN (billed by bandwidth) as an example.

Suppose that you purchased a pay-per-use Enterprise Edition VPN gateway (associated with an enterprise router; specification: Professional 1; number of VPN connection groups: 20; bandwidth: 20 Mbit/s) at 09:59:30 on April 18, 2023, and deleted it at 10:45:46 on the same day. Two usage periods will be billed:

• 30 seconds from 09:59:30 to 10:00:00
• 2746 seconds from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46

The price displayed in the product pricing details is per hour, so you need to divide it by 3600 to obtain the price for each second and then multiple the per-second price by the total number of seconds. VPN resources of different types are billed individually, as described in Table 2.

Billing Example (Billed by Traffic)

Compared with Enterprise Edition VPN (billed by traffic), Classic VPN (billed by traffic) does not support association with an enterprise router and is billed based on the number of connections, instead of being billed by the number of connection groups. The following uses the more complex Enterprise Edition VPN (billed by traffic) as an example.

Suppose that you purchased a pay-per-use Enterprise Edition VPN gateway (associated with an enterprise router; specification: Professional 1; number of VPN connection groups: 20) at 09:59:30 on April 18, 2023, and deleted it at 10:45:46 on the same day. Two usage periods will be billed:

• 30 seconds from 09:59:30 to 10:00:00
• 2746 seconds from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46

The price displayed in the product pricing details is per hour, so you need to divide it by 3600 to obtain the price for each second and then multiple the per-second price by the total number of seconds. VPN resources of different types are billed individually, as described in Table 3.

Price Change After Quota Change

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

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

For example, if you purchased an Enterprise Edition VPN gateway instance (associated with an enterprise router; specification: Professional 1; bandwidth: 20 Mbit/s) billed by traffic at 09:00:00, and increased the bandwidth to 30 Mbit/s (still associated with an enterprise router and using the specification of Professional 1) at 09:30:00 on the same day, the following will be billed:

• Usage of the original quota (associated with an enterprise router; specification: Professional 1; bandwidth: 20 Mbit/s) from 09:00:00 to 09:30:00
• Usage of the new quota (associated with an enterprise router; specification: Professional 1; bandwidth: 30 Mbit/s) from 09:30:00 to 10:00:00

Impacts of Arrears

Figure 1 shows the states that pay-per-use VPN resources can go through throughout the lifecycle. After VPN resources are purchased, they enter the valid period and run normally during this period. If your account goes into arrears, VPN resources enter a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 1 Lifecycle of pay-per-use VPN resources

Arrears Reminder

The system will deduct fees for pay-per-use resources when each billing cycle ends. If your account goes into arrears, Huawei Cloud will notify you by email, SMS, or in-app message.

Impacts of Arrears

If your account is insufficient to pay your amount due, your account goes into arrears, and the pay-per-use VPN resources enter a 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, VPN resources turn to Frozen and enter a retention period. You cannot perform any operations on pay-per-use VPN resources in Frozen state.

If you do not bring your account balance current before the retention period ends, your resources (including the VPN gateway, VPN connections, and EIPs) will be released and the data cannot be restored.

• Huawei Cloud defines that both the grace period and retention period of the VPN service are 15 days.
• For details about top-up, see Topping Up an Account.