Pay-per-Use

Pay-per-use is postpaid, and useful if you do not want to pay upfront or if you want to avoid a long-term commitment. This section describes the billing rules for pay-per-use KooPhone resources.

Application Scenarios

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

Billing Items

KooPhone is billed on the instance specifications, number of instances, and subscription duration. You are billed for the following items on a pay-per-use basis.

**Table 1** Billing items
Billing Item	Description
Cloud phone type	Professional cloud phones are available.
Cloud phone specification	The price varies depending on the instance specifications. A professional instance is cheaper than an enterprise instance with the same specifications.
Number of instances	The fee increases linearly with the number of purchased instances.
Usage duration	Actual duration for using a cloud phone in pay-per-use mode.

Billing Cycle

A pay-per-use KooPhone resource is calculated in seconds and billed by the hour. Once settlement is complete, a new billing cycle starts. The billing starts when the KooPhone resource is created and ends when it is deleted.

It takes time to create and enable a cloud phone. The billing starts from the time when the instance was successfully created. You can choose Billing Center > Orders > My Orders and click Details to view the time.

For example, if you purchased a pay-per-use cloud phone at 08:45:30 and deleted it at 08:55:00, the billing cycle was from 08:00:00 to 09:00:00 and the fee was generated from 08:45:30 to 08:55:30. You were billed for 600 seconds.

Billing Example

You purchased a pay-per-use cloud phone (professional, 2 vCPUs, 4 GB memory, and 16 GB storage) at 09:59:30 on Apr 18, 2023, and then deleted it at 10:45:46 on the same day. You were billed for:

Usage of 30 seconds from 09:59:30 to 10:00:00
Usage of 2,746 seconds from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46

The price displayed in Price is per hour, so you need to divide it by 3,600 to obtain the price for each second and then multiply the per-second price by the total number of seconds. The billing formula is as follows: Instance per-second price x Usage duration x Number of purchased resources.

Impact of Arrears

Figure 1 shows the statuses a pay-per-use KooPhone resource can go through throughout its lifecycle. After a resource is purchased, it enters a valid period and runs normally during this period. If your account goes into arrears, the resource enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 1 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use KooPhone resource

Arrears Alert

The system will deduct fees for pay-per-use resources at the end of each billing cycle. When your account is in arrears, we will notify the Huawei Cloud account creator by email, SMS, and internal message.

Impact of Arrears

If your account balance is insufficient, your account goes into arrears. However, your pay-per-use resources will not be stopped immediately. There will be 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 settle your account balance before the grace period ends, the resource enters a retention period and its status becomes Frozen. You cannot perform any operations while it is in the retention period.
If you do not settle your account balance before the retention period ends, your data stored in the resource will be deleted and cannot be restored, and the resource will be released.

For details about the grace period and retention period, see What Is a Grace Period of Huawei Cloud? How Long Is It? and What Is a Retention Period of Huawei Cloud? How Long Is It?