Help Center/ Situation Awareness/ Billing/ Billing Modes/ Overview of Billing Modes

Updated on 2023-09-19 GMT+08:00

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Overview of Billing Modes

SA provides two billing modes, yearly/monthly and pay-per-use billing, to meet requirements in different scenarios.

Yearly/Monthly billing: A prepaid mode in which you pay for the service before using it. Your bill is settled based on the required period. The longer you use the service, the more discounts you got.
Pay-per-use billing is a postpaid mode in which you pay for what you use. You are billed by second based on the actual usage. Your bill is settled by the hour. With the pay-per-use billing mode, you can easily adapt to resource requirement changes, reducing the risk of over-provisioning of resources or lacking capacity. In this mode, there are no upfront commitments required.

Table 1 lists the differences between the billing modes.

**Table 1** Billing modes
Billing Mode	Yearly/Monthly	Pay-per-Use
Payment method	Prepaid Billed for the required period specified in your order	Postpaid Billed for what you use.
Billing period	Billed for the required duration specified in your order	Billed by the second and settled by the hour
Billing items	Service edition + ECS quota	Service edition (professional edition only) + HSS quota for ECSs
Changing the billing mode	The billing mode cannot be changed to pay-per-use.	Can be changed to yearly/monthly. Changing the Billing Mode
Changing specifications	You can change the service edition you are using and increase the ECS quota.	You can increase the ECS quota.
Application scenario	This billing mode is cost-effective and suitable when the duration of resource usage is predictable. The yearly/monthly mode is recommended for long-term users.	This mode is suitable when you want more flexibility and control on resource usage.