Pay-per-Use Billing

Pay-per-use billing means you pay nothing up front and are not tied into any contract or commitment. This section describes the billing rules for pay-per-use HSS resources.

Application Scenarios

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

Billing Items

You are billed for the following resources on a pay-per-use basis.

**Table 1** Billing items
Billing Item		Description
Protection quota		HSS editions, including the professional, premium, container, and WTP editions.
Pay-per-use container image scan		Container image scan is a value-added service billed per use. You are billed per successful scan per repository image or CI/CD image.

Billed Usage Period

Pay-per-use HSS resources include protection quotas and value-added services. Only protection quotas are billed based on the billing period.

Protection quotas: You are billed based on the usage duration (accurate to seconds). The fee is settled on the hour (UTC+08:00).
Value-added services: You are billed per use. No specific billing period applies. The fee is settled on the hour (UTC+08:00).

Protection quota billing period:

The billing starts when HSS is enabled.
The billing ends when HSS is disabled.

For example, if you enable the pay-per-use HSS premium edition for a server at 08:45:30 and disable it at 08:55:00, the billing period is from 08:00:00 to 09:00:00. You will be billed for 600 seconds from 08:45:30 to 08:55:30.

Billing Examples

Suppose you enabled the pay-per-use HSS premium edition for a server at 9:59:30 on April 18, 2023 and disabled it at 10:45:46 on April 18, 2023. Two usage periods will be billed:

Usage of 30 seconds from 9:59:30 to 10:00:00
Usage of 2,746 seconds from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46

You will be billed for both usage periods. For details, see Table 2. The price displayed in the pricing details is per hour, so you need to divide it by 3,600 to obtain the price for each second and then multiple the per-second price by the total number of seconds.

**Table 2** Formula
Resource	Formula	Unit Price
Protection quotas (professional, premium, container, and WTP editions)	Unit price of a protection quota x Billing duration	For details, see the price of the specifications in HSS Pricing Details.

Figure 1 shows how the total price is calculated.

The prices in the figure are just examples. The actual prices are those displayed on HSS Pricing Details.

Figure 1 Total price for pay-per-use HSS

Impact of Arrears

Figure 2 shows the statuses a pay-per-use HSS subscription can have throughout its lifecycle. After HSS is purchased, it enters the valid period and runs normally during this period. If your account goes into arrears, HSS enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 2 Lifecycle of pay-per-use HSS

Arrears Reminder

The system will bill you for pay-per-use resources after each billing cycle ends. If your account is in arrears, we will notify you by email, SMS, or in-app message.

Impact of Arrears

If your account is insufficient to pay your amount due, your account goes into arrears, and the pay-per-use HSS enters the grace period. You are still responsible for expenditures generated during the grace period. You can view the charges on the Billing & Costs > Overview page and pay any past due balance as needed.

If you do not bring your account balance current before the grace period expires, HSS turns to Frozen and enters a retention period. You cannot perform any operations on pay-per-use HSS in the Frozen status.

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