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BackNew, Simplified Billing Mechanism
At cloudscale.ch, there are no fixed costs or minimum terms and as a customer you only pay for what you actually use. And there is no catch: to-the-second billing means that you do not have to worry about adding on services when you need them as you can simply delete them again afterwards. While this benefit has remained unchanged, we have completely revised and simplified the mechanism behind it.
Until now, cloud resources could be "exchanged"
If you created a virtual server or other cloud resources, the relevant costs for 24 hours were taken from your account balance immediately. When this prepaid period expired, a new fee was taken for the next 24 hours – for as long as you kept the resources.
When cloud resources were deleted, a credit note was issued for any remaining unused, but prepaid time in this 24-hour period. When servers and volumes were scaled, the credit note was issued at the old price and then the new price was charged – again for 24 hours. This means that the cloud resources were invoiced individually throughout the day depending on when they were created or scaled for the last time.
Now, only actual costs are charged
The costs are now recorded in the background and taken from your account balance shortly after midnight (in the local time zone of Zurich). This means that for cloud resources that have already been deleted again, you are charged the actual costs directly instead of by means of a "down payment invoice" that is then corrected using a credit note.
While both methods ultimately result in the same costs, the new mechanism is based on what you intuitively expect from to-the-second billing. And in certain constellations this avoids numerous unnecessary debits and payment reversals, e.g. if you use integration tests with dynamically created GitLab runners or if you are simply trying out various flavors to find the one that is right for you.
On a new overview page per project, the costs are further broken down.
Overview of total costs and composition
As previously, you will see the daily total costs of your individual projects in the "Billing" area of our cloud control panel. On a new overview page per project, these costs are now further broken down, which allows you to see at a glance how these costs are distributed across the individual resource types (e.g. compute, storage, etc.) and across the specific resources (individual virtual servers, volumes, etc.). Here, the costs per day are listed for all resources that exist in the project at the time in question.
Our object storage is an exception as it is not calculated per day but based on actual usage. This is why these costs were always taken from your account balance retrospectively, i.e. shortly after midnight. As there is no fixed price per day here given that it is usage-based, the overview shows the average costs of the past seven days.
Flexibility is one of the many advantages of the cloud. You always book and pay for exactly what you need. Billing per calendar day (instead of for each individual cloud resource) means that the "bookkeeping" behind this system has been significantly simplified. And we are already working on other tools to provide you with enhanced support in terms of cost control.
No calculator required.
Your cloudscale.ch team