Yearly/Monthly Billing

Yearly/Monthly billing is a prepaid billing mode in which you pay before using resources. It is suitable when your resource requirements are fixed because you can pay less by using longer. In the yearly/monthly billing mode, we offer discounts to you. This topic describes the billing rules of yearly/monthly WAF resources.

Application Scenario

In yearly/monthly billing mode, you need to pay for a required duration in advance. This mode is suitable for long-term and relatively fixed service requirements. The yearly/monthly billing mode is recommended for the following scenarios:

Stable services: enterprises' official websites, online malls, blogs, and others. Yearly/Monthly billing provides higher cost efficiency.
Long-term projects: scientific research projects, large-scale events, and others. Yearly/Monthly billing facilitates stable supply of resources throughout the project.
Service peak estimation: e-commerce promotion season, festivals, holidays, and others. Resources insufficiency can be avoided by pre-purchasing resources for peak demands.
High data security: For services that require high data security, yearly/monthly billing facilitates continuous usage of the resources.

Billing items

Cloud mode: service edition, domain name, QPS, and rule expansion packages

Billing Period

The billing period of a yearly/monthly WAF instance is determined by required duration (UTC+8:00). The billing period starts from the time you activate or renew your subscription (precise to seconds), and ends at 23:59:59 on the expiration date.

For example, if you purchased a WAF instance for one month on Mar 08, 2023, 15:50:04, the billing period is from Mar 08, 2023, 15:50:04 to Apr 08, 2023, 23:59:59.

Billing Examples

Take the yearly/monthly billing mode as an example. Assume that you purchased a professional edition cloud WAF instance at 15:50:04 on July 8, 2023, along with one domain name, QPS, and rule expansion packages. Your subscription is one month and you manually renew the subscription for one month before the subscription expires. The billing details are as follows:

The first billing cycle is from 15:50:04 on July 8, 2023 to 23:59:59 on Aug. 8, 2023.
The second billing cycle is from 23:59:59 on Aug. 8, 2023 to 23:59:59 on Sep. 8, 2023.

Figure 1 Yearly/Monthly billing details

Impact on Billing After Specification Change

If the specifications of the current yearly/monthly cloud WAF edition do not meet your service requirements, you can change the specifications on the WAF console. Specifically, you can change the WAF edition you are using, scale up or down domain expansion packages, QPS expansion packages, and rule expansion packages.

Edition upgrade or expansion package quantity increase: You need to pay for the price difference.
Edition scale-down or expansion package quantity reduction: You will get a refund of the price difference.

If you have used the functions that are included only in the edition you are using, changing to a lower edition is not supported.

Specification upgrade fee = New edition price × Remaining period - Old specification price × Remaining period

The remaining period in the formula is the remaining days of each calendar month divided by the maximum days of corresponding calendar month. For more information, see Pricing of a Changed Specification.

Impacts of Expiration

Figure 2 describes the status of each stage of a yearly/monthly WAF instance. After purchase, the WAF instance runs properly within the billing period, and this period is the validity period. When the Kafka instance expires and you do not renew it, it goes into the grace period and then the retention period.

Figure 2 Resource Lifecycle

Expiration Reminder

From the 7th day before a yearly/monthly WAF instance expires, the system will send an expiration reminder to the creator of the account by email, SMS, and internal message.

Impact After Expiration

If you do not renew a yearly/monthly WAF instance, the instance enters a grace period. During the grace period, you can use WAF to protect websites.

If you do not renew your yearly/monthly WAF instance before the grace period ends, it goes into the retention period and its status turns to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on such instances in the retention period.

For details, see Retention Period.

During this period, WAF only forwards traffic but does not check it against your protection policies.
When this period ends, resources will be cleared, that is, all configurations of your domain names will be deleted. During the clearing period, domain names are pointed back to origin severs by default. However, services on your domain names may not run properly because there may be inconsistencies between your configured protocols and ports.