Yearly/Monthly Billing

Scenarios

If you want to ensure resource stability over a certain period of time, yearly/monthly billing is a good choice for the following types of workloads:

• Long-term workloads with stable resource requirements, such as official websites, online malls, and blogs
• Long-term projects, such as scientific research projects and large-scale events
• Workloads with predictable traffic bursts, for example, e-commerce promotions or festivals.
• Workloads with high data security requirements.

Billing Items

The following billing items support yearly/monthly billing.

Billing Method

A yearly/monthly IoTDA resource is billed by the subscription duration. The billing cycle begins when you activate or renew your subscription and ends at 23:59:59 on the expiration date of the following calendar month or year. To determine the expiration date, you can increment the month or year by 1.

Example:

• If you subscribed to a standard instance for one month on March 8, 2023, 15:50:04, the billing cycle is from March 8, 2023, 15:50:04 to April 8, 2023, 23:59:59.
• If you subscribed to a standard instance for one month on February 8, 2023, 15:50:04, the billing cycle is from February 8, 2023, 15:50:04 to March 8, 2023, 23:59:59.
• If you subscribed to a standard instance for one year on February 8, 2024 (leap year), 15:50:04, the billing cycle is from February 8, 2024, 15:50:04 to February 8, 2025, 23:59:59.

Billing Examples

Assume that you subscribed to a standard S1 unit at 15:50:04 on March 8, 2023. If you manually renew the subscription for one month before the subscription expires:

• Billing cycle 1: March 8, 2023, 15:50:04 to April 8, 2023, 23:59:59
• Billing cycle 2: April 9, 2023, 00:00:00 to May 8, 2023, 23:59:59

You need to prepay for each billing cycle. Table 2 list the billing formula.

Impact on Billing After Specifications Change

If the specifications of a yearly/monthly instance no longer meet your needs, you can change the specifications on the console. The system will recalculate the price and either bill or refund you the difference.

• If you upgrade the specifications, you need to pay the difference in price.
• If you downgrade the specifications, Huawei Cloud will refund you the difference.

Assume that you subscribed to one low-frequency unit S1 of the standard instance on April 8, 2023 for one month. You plan to change the specifications to intermediate frequency unit S2 on April 18, 2023, the number of units is 1. The price for the old specifications is 800/month, and that for the new specification is 3,000/month. The calculation formula is as follows:

Price difference for the specifications upgrade = Price for the new specifications × Remaining period - Price for the original specifications × Remaining period

The remaining period in the formula is the number of days remaining in each calendar month divided by the maximum number of days in that month. In this example, the remaining period = 12 (the remaining days in April, excluding the change day)/30 (the maximum number of days in April) + 8 (the remaining days in May)/31 (the maximum number of days in May) = 0.6581. Cost of specification upgrade = 3,000 × 0.6581 - 800 × 0.6581 = 1447.82.

For details, see Pricing of a Changed Specification.

Impact of Expiration

Figure 1 shows the statuses of a yearly/monthly IoTDA resource in each phase. After a resource is purchased, it enters a valid period and runs normally during this period. If the resource is not renewed after it expires, it first enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 1 Lifecycle of yearly/monthly IoTDA resources

• Expiration warning: The system will send you a reminder (by email, SMS, or in-app message) 7 days before a yearly/monthly IoTDA resource expires to remind you to renew the subscription.
• Impact of expiration:
  • If your yearly/monthly IoTDA resource is not renewed after it expires, it changes to the Expired status and enters a grace period. During the grace period, you can use IoTDA.
  • If the yearly/monthly IoTDA resource is not renewed after the grace period ends, its status turns to Frozen and it enters a retention period. You cannot perform any operations on the resource while it is in the retention period.
  • After the retention period expires, if the yearly/monthly IoTDA resource is not renewed, the resource will be released, and data cannot be restored

NOTE:

• For details about the renewal, see Overview.