Pay-per-Use Billing

Application Scenarios

Pay-per-use billing is good for short-term, bursty, or unpredictable services that cannot tolerate any interruptions, such as applications for e-commerce flash sales, temporary testing, and scientific computing.

S2C Classic VPN supports pay-per-use billing. The billing modes available for a region are subject to those displayed on the page.

Billing Items

Pay-per-use VPN can be billed by bandwidth or traffic. The billing items vary according to the billing mode, as described in Table 1.

Billing Cycle

Pay-per-use VPN resources are billed by the second. Bills are settled hourly on the hour (UTC+08:00). After the settlement is complete, a new billing cycle starts. The billing starts when the gateway instance is launched and ends when the instance is deleted.

Billing Example (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 the number of connection groups.

Suppose that you purchased a pay-per-use Classic VPN gateway (specification: Professional 1; number of VPN connections: 20; bandwidth: 20 Mbit/s) at 09:59:30 on April 18, 2024, 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 multiply 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)

Classic VPN (billed by traffic) does not support association with an enterprise router, and is billed based on the number of connections instead of the number of connection groups.

Suppose that you purchased a pay-per-use S2C Classic VPN gateway (specification: Professional 1; number of VPN connections: 20) at 09:59:30 on April 18, 2024, 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 multiply the per-second price by the total number of seconds. VPN resources of different types are billed individually, as described in Table 3.

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 validity 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, we 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.