Overview

Workspace supports two billing modes: yearly/monthly and pay-per-use.

Yearly/Monthly is a prepaid billing. You pay in advance for a subscription, and in exchange, you get a discounted rate. The longer the subscription, the bigger the discount. This mode is suitable for long-term, stable services.

Pay-per-use: This is a pay-as-you-go service, meaning you are billed only for what you use. Billing is based on the running duration of your cloud desktop, which starts automatically upon creation. The usage is calculated by the second but billed every hour. This mode allows you to adjust resource usage easily. You do not need to prepare resources, and will not have excessive or insufficient reserved resources. This mode is typically suitable for scenarios with sudden traffic bursts, such as e-commerce flash sales.

Table 1 describes the differences between the two billing modes.

**Table 1** Billing modes
Billing Mode	Yearly/Monthly	Pay-per-use
Payment	Prepaid: You will be billed by the subscription period.	Postpaid: You will be billed by the actual usage of your cloud desktop.
Billing Cycle	You will be billed by the subscription period. The usage is not limited within the subscription period.	The usage is calculated by the second but billed every hour.
Changing the billing mode	You can change the billing mode from yearly/monthly to pay-per-use. The change takes effect only after the yearly/monthly subscription expires. Changing from Yearly/Monthly to Pay-per-Use	You can change the billing mode from pay-per-use to yearly/monthly. Changing from Pay-per-Use to Yearly/Monthly
Changing specifications	You can change the instance specifications.	You can change the instance specifications.
Scenarios	If your future usage is predictable in a long term, this billing mode is generally less expensive than pay-per-use and therefore recommended.	This mode is suitable when you want more flexibility and control on compute resource usage.