The subscription billing method requires you to pay for a service before you can use it. This topic describes the billing of Elastic Cloud Phone (ECP) on a subscription basis.
Applicable resources
The following table describes the billing rules of a subscription ECP instance and its storage.
Item | Billing rule |
Instance type | Fee = Unit price of an instance type × Subscription duration |
Storage | Fee = Unit price of a disk × Subscription duration |
If you use your ECP instance to access the Internet, you are charged for the network bandwidth on a pay-by-data-transfer basis. You must activate Elastic IP Address (EIP) before your ECP instance can access the Internet. For information about EIP billing, see Overview of EIP billing.
Settlement cycle
The subscription billing method requires you to pay for ECP resources before you can use them. You are charged for a subscription ECP instance based on the prices of its resources and its subscription duration. The billing cycle is the subscription duration, in UTC+8. The duration can be 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, or 5 years.
The billing cycle of an ECP instance starts when the instance is created or renewed and ends at 23:59:59 on the expiration date. For example, if you purchased an ECP instance for one month at 15:20:00 on November 20, 2020, the instance expired at 23:59:59 on December 20, 2020.
If you do not renew a subscription ECP instance that expires, you cannot continue to use it. After the ECP instance expires, the system retains the resources of the instance for seven days. If you do not renew the instance within the seven days, the system releases the resources.
Changes in resource status for an expired subscription ECP instance
The following section describes the changes in resource status after a subscription ECP instance expires:
After the instance expires, it enters the Expired state. You can renew the instance to retain all of its resources.
Within 15 days after expiration, the status of the instance changes at any moment from Expired to Expired and Being Recycled, and some resources are released. You can renew the instance within this period, but the renewal may fail. If the renewal fails, you can retry or submit a ticket.
More than 15 days after expiration, all resources of the instance are released.