Pay-per-Use

Scenario

Pay-per-use billing is suitable for gateways that do not need to run 24/7 or for a long period of time.

Billing Items

For example, you are going to use a dedicated gateway with 5 Mbit/s public network access bandwidth. You can view the price at the bottom of the Price Calculator page.

Figure 1 Example price in pay-per-use mode

The price is calculated based on the edition, public network access bandwidth, number of gateways, and usage duration.

Billing Cycle

A pay-per-use gateway is billed in seconds, and settled on the hour (GMT+08:00). Once settlement is complete, it enters a new billing cycle. The billing starts from the time when the deployed gateway starts running and ends at the time when the gateway is deleted.

For example, if you deployed a professional gateway on Mar 10, 2023, 08:45:30 and deleted it at 09:30:00, the billing cycle includes the following two parts:

• 08:00:00–09:00:00: Fees are generated from 08:45:30 to 09:00:00. The billing duration is 870 seconds in this period.
• 09:00:00–10:00:00: Fees are generated from 09:00:00 to 09:30:00. The billing duration is 1800 seconds in this period.

Billing Example

Impact on the Billing After Gateway Upgrade

If your current gateway edition cannot meet your requirements, upgrade it, for example, from basic to professional or platinum. The upgrade will not affect your services.

If you upgrade the gateway edition within one hour, multiple billing records will be generated. The start time and end time of each billing record correspond to when different configurations took effect within the hour.

For example, you deployed a professional gateway (gateway unit price: $3.47 USD/hour; bandwidth unit price: $0.023 USD/hour) on Mar 10, 2023, 09:00:00, and then upgraded it to the enterprise edition (gateway unit price: $5.2 USD/hour; bandwidth unit price: $0.023 USD/hour) at 09:30:00, two billing records are generated between 09:00:00 and 10:00:00.

• The first billing record corresponds to 09:00:00–09:30:00, based on the price for the professional edition. You can calculate the price using the formula in Billing Items: 1800 ÷ 3600 x 3.47 x 1 + 1800 ÷ 3600 x 0.023 x 1 = $1.75 USD.
• The second billing record corresponds to 09:30:00–10:00:00, based on the price for the enterprise edition. You can calculate the price using the formula in Billing Items: 1800 ÷ 3600 x 5.2 x 1 + 1800 ÷ 3600 x 0.023 x 1 = $2.61 USD.

Impact of Arrears

A pay-per-use gateway is billed in seconds, and settled on the hour (GMT+08:00). Once settlement is complete, it enters a new billing cycle. The system will deduct fees for pay-per-use gateways upon the end of each billing cycle.

If the settlement fails due to insufficient account balance at a certain settlement time point, your account will be in arrears. Huawei Cloud will notify you by email, SMS, or internal message.

In arrears, the pay-per-use gateway continues rendering services but it enters the grace period. You need to pay the fees of your pay-per-use gateway incurred during the grace period. To view the fees, go to the Billing & Costs > Bills > Overview page. Huawei Cloud will deduct the fees after you top up your account.

If you do not pay the arrears within the grace period, the gateway enters the retention period and its status turns to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on pay-per-use gateways in the retention period.

If you do not pay the arrears within the retention period, your gateway will be released, and data will be lost.

The grace period and retention period are 15 days.