Overview

GES offers two billing modes: yearly/monthly (instances are prepaid by month or year) and pay-per-use, to meet the needs of different users in various scenarios.

• Yearly/Monthly: a prepaid mode where payment is made in advance and billed according to the subscription term. The longer the subscription term, the greater the discount. This mode is generally suitable for mature businesses with long-term stable equipment needs.
• Pay-per-use: a postpaid mode where payment is made after usage, billed according to the actual usage time of graph instances, with billing calculated by the second and settled hourly. The pay-per-use mode allows you to flexibly adjust resource usage based on actual business needs, without the need to pre-set resources, thereby reducing the risk of over or under provisioning. This mode is typically suitable for scenarios with sudden traffic bursts, such as e-commerce flash sales.

  Table 1 compares the two billing modes.

  Table 1 Differences between billing modes

  Billing Mode	Yearly/Monthly	Pay-per-Use
  Payment	Prepaid	Postpaid
  Billed Usage Period	Billed by the subscription term you purchase	Billed by the second and settled hourly
  Billed Items	Graph specifications (number of edges), data storage space, and public network bandwidth	Graph specifications (number of edges), data storage space, and public network bandwidth
  Changing the Specifications	Supported	Supported
  Application Scenarios	For scenarios where resource usage can be predicted, this pricing mode is more cost-effective than pay-per-use. This mode is recommended for long-term users.	For scenarios where there are fluctuations in compute resource demand, this mode allows for easy control over your resources.