Pay-per-Use Billing

Recommended Scenario

Pay-per-use is applicable to short-term, abrupt, or unpredictable services that cannot be interrupted, such as e-commerce flash sales, temporary testing, and scientific computing.

Billing Period

A pay-per-use ROMA Connect instance is billed in seconds, and settled on the hour (GMT+8). Once settlement is complete, it enters a new billing period. Billing starts from the time when the ROMA Connect instance is successfully created and ends at the time when the instance is deleted.

It takes a certain time to launch a ROMA Connect instance. Billing starts from the time when the instance is successfully created.

Billing Example

Assume you purchased a pay-per-use 15-RCU ROMA Connect instance at 09:30:00 on Oct 16, 2023 and then deleted it at 11:15:46 on the same day. The following usage periods are billed:

• 9:30:00 to 10:00:00: 1,800 seconds
• 10:00:00 to 11:00:00: 3,600 seconds
  

  From 11:00:00 to 11:15:46, the fee is not charged since the period is less than an hour.

You need to pay for each billing period in advance. The billing formula is as follows: Unit price of instance specifications x Billing duration. You need to divide the hourly price by 3,600 to get the price for each second and then multiple the per-second price by the total number of seconds.

The unit price of this pay-per-use instance is $24 USD/hour. The total fee for the two billing periods is 24 x (1,800 + 3,600)/3,600 = $36 USD.

Impact on Billing After Specification Change

If you change instance specifications after purchasing a pay-per-use instance, a new order will be generated based on the new specification's price. The old order automatically becomes invalid.

If you change instance specifications within one hour, multiple billing records will be generated. Different bills record the billing for different specifications.

For example, assume that you purchased a pay-per-use 15-RCU ROMA Connect instance at 9:00:00. You upgrade the instance flavor to 30 RCUs at 9:30:00. Then, two billing records are generated from 9:00:00 to 10:00:00.

• The first record is for 09:00:00 to 09:30:00, billed by 15 RCUs.
• The second record is for 09:30:00 to 10:00:00, billed by 30 RCUs.

Impact of Arrears

Figure 1 describes the status of each stage of a pay-per-use ROMA Connect instance. After you purchase a new-version ROMA Connect instance, the instance is running properly within the billing period, and this period is the validity period. When the automatic billing of the pay-per-use instance leads to arrears on your account, the account status turns to arrears, and the instance enters the grace period and retention period accordingly.

Figure 1 Life cycle of a pay-per-use ROMA Connect instance

Arrears Alert

The system will deduct fees for pay-per-use resources at the end of each billing period. You will be notified by email, SMS, or internal messages when your account is in arrears.

Arrears Impact

When your account is in arrears due to automatic fee deduction for pay-per-use ROMA Connect instances, the account status turns to arrears. In arrears, the pay-per-use resource continues rendering service but the resource enters the grace period. You need to pay the fees of your pay-per-use resource incurred during the grace period. To view the fees, go to the Billing Center > 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 instance enters the retention period and its status turns to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on pay-per-use resources in the retention period.

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

• Both the grace and retention periods are 15 days.

• For details about how to make repayment, see Making Repayments (Postpaid Direct Customers).