Pricing & Billing
Metered Billing
Billing that measures and charges for exact resource consumption, the mechanism behind pay-as-you-go pricing.
Metered billing is the machinery under pay-as-you-go: the provider measures each resource you consume, compute-seconds, gigabytes stored, requests handled, bytes transferred, and charges for the exact amount. Nothing is rounded to a monthly bucket. Your bill is the sum of thousands of tiny measurements, which is precise and, at scale, hard to predict.
Precision cuts both ways. You never pay for capacity you didn't use, which is efficient for variable workloads. But the granularity is why cloud bills are famously hard to forecast, and why a small config mistake, a debug log writing gigabytes, a cron job that loops, shows up as real money. The meter records everything faithfully, including your mistakes.
Cost visibility tools and billing alerts exist precisely because metered billing hides the total until the invoice lands. Setting a budget alert is the standard hedge. Flat-rate hosting removes the uncertainty entirely by not metering at all, trading efficiency for a number you can plan around.