How does billing actually work?
You might have seen weird numbers on your latest invoice and are wondering how they come to be?
So, for example the “29240” is a weird number if you take it out of context. But if you understand how we collect your usage and bill you exactly for what you have used over the last billing period all those numbers will make a lot more sense (I promise).
Data Collection
Every full hour we take the sum of the current size of your datastores and divide it by 100. So if you have a 1TB datastore that would result in the numer 10 (because: 1000GB / 100 = 10). Why 100? Because we bill in 100GB increments. This data is the posted to our PSP (Payment Service Provider). This means that in the last hour you have used 10 100GB hours or 10 times 100GB in the last hour.
Billing Calculation
A single 100GB hour is billed at 0.001389 EUR (at least in the example invoice) so you would pay 0.001389 EUR for every 100GB every hour. This means that for 1TB you would pay 10 * 0.001389 EUR (because 1000GB / 100 = 10).
Since we do this every full hour but of course only bill you once a month, the usage gets collected over roughly 720 hours (720h / 24h = 30 days). That way at the end of the billing period we can multiply the accumulated usage with the 100GB/h price and get the monthly bill.
The Big "why’
You may argue that this is overly complex and it should just be a fixed amount every month. But there is one main reason we do it this way: flexibility. You can scale up and down your datastore all the time without having to pay extra money upfront or be stuck with a too-big datastore. Because we collect it each hour you have the full flexibility to resize your datastore to fit your current needs. And at the end of the month you don’t end up overpaying for any unused storage.