Usage and costs¶
NubeStack Cloud measures what your organization uses: how many hours each instance existed, how many gigabytes of storage you kept and for how long, how long you held public IPs. Once NubeStack has published its rates, that usage is priced into a monthly statement and shown day by day in the cost explorer.
Provisional
Every usage figure, statement, price estimate and cost in the console is marked provisional. Measurement is still being checked against each location's own records, and until that is done the figures can change. A provisional statement is not an invoice. Use the commercial information supplied with your account for billing questions; the console does not collect payments or calculate taxes.
What is measured¶
| Measure | Unit | Counted while |
|---|---|---|
| Instance hours | hours | the instance exists, in any state, including stopped and shelved |
| vCPU hours | vCPU·hours | the instance is running or starting |
| RAM | GiB·hours | the instance is running or starting |
| Volumes | GiB·hours | the volume exists, attached or not |
| Volume snapshots | GiB·hours | the snapshot exists |
| Images | GiB·hours | one of your own images exists |
| Public IP hours | hours | the public IP is allocated to the project, attached or not |
| Internet gateway hours | hours | the gateway exists |
| Load balancer hours | hours | the load balancer exists, in any state |
Which measures are charged, and at what price, is set in NubeStack's rate card: Billing → Prices. A price for one size is set by its catalog name, such as an instance size, a volume type or a load balancer type, and applies in every location that offers it. A stopped instance still counts instance hours; its vCPU and RAM hours stop.
Where to see it¶
- Billing → Usage, in the organization, for owners, admins and the billing role: pick a period, then break a measure down by project, location or kind of resource. See Usage.
- Billing → Statements, Cost explorer and Prices, for the same roles: what each month cost at the published rates, where the money goes, and the rates themselves. See Statements and cost explorer.
- Billing in a project: that project's usage and cost, for the same roles.
- Quota, at the bottom of a project's menu: what that project used this month, for anyone with a role on the project.
- Create pages: owners, admins and the billing role see a price estimate per hour or per month before they create something billed. Dialogs that create an Internet gateway or a snapshot say its rate.
How usage is built¶
Usage comes from what each location reports every few minutes. When something starts or stops between two reports, the moment is estimated; such hours are marked partly estimated. A location that has not reported recently is shown with the time of its last report. Missing hours are never filled in as zero: Hours not counted shows them, and they are added when the location reports again. Corrections never rewrite history silently: a correction to a month already closed appears on the next statement as an adjustment.
Usage is recorded for everything in your projects, including what you make with a location's own dashboard or CLI. A resource that failed to create may still have been counted for the time it existed. After a project or the organization is deleted, its usage records are kept.
Keep costs down¶
- Release public IPs you no longer need: an allocated address counts even when attached to nothing, and stays allocated after its instance is deleted.
- Delete snapshots and images you no longer need; they count for as long as they exist.
- Stop instances you are not using, or put them on a power schedule: vCPU and RAM hours stop while an instance is stopped. Instance hours, disks and addresses still count.
- Delete an Internet gateway you made only for a test.
- Use tags and the cost explorer's Tag view to see which team or environment spends what.