Hourly (Usage) Billing

What hourly billing is

An hourly service is prepaid and metered. Instead of receiving a renewal document each month, the customer keeps a credit balance and the platform deducts one hour’s charge from it, every hour, for as long as the service exists. When the balance can no longer cover the next hour, the service is suspended; when the customer tops up, it comes back on its own.

This is a different rulebook from fixed-cycle billing. Hourly services never appear in the nightly renewal run, they are never chased by invoice reminders, and their suspension and termination clocks are measured in hours rather than days. If you are looking for the fixed-cycle behaviour, read Automatic Billing and the Service Lifecycle instead.

Everything about the balance itself — how customers top up, how the ledger reads, refunds and manual adjustments — is covered in Credit Balance.

Turning it on

Hourly pricing has to be switched on at three levels before a customer can buy it.

1. Platform. Settings → Billing → Automation → Hourly Billing → Enable Hourly Billing. Until this is on, the hourly option is not even offered in the product category editor, and no hourly charging, suspension or termination happens.
2. Category. Open a product category and, in Billing Cycles, switch on Hourly price. It is off by default. You can set a Discount per cycle percentage for it like any other cycle, and choose Hourly price as the Default display price cycle if you want listings to lead with the hourly figure.
3. Product. On the product’s Pricing tab an Hourly price box appears — only for products in a category with hourly enabled. See Products and Product Categories.

Hourly is available for virtual servers, game servers and the other service types you sell; it is set per category, so whichever categories you enable it on will offer it.

How the hourly rate is worked out

You can type the hourly price directly. If you leave it blank, the platform fills it in for you from the monthly price, divided by 720 — a 30-day month — with any category cycle discount applied. The box shows the figure it would use as an Auto: hint beneath it, so you can see the derived rate before accepting it.

Hourly prices carry four decimal places, so sub-cent rates work. Add-on prices and location surcharges are derived from their monthly figures the same way, and in a multi-currency setup the hourly price is always converted from the base price rather than set per currency.

Setup fees are waived on an hourly order. Whatever setup fee the product carries, an hourly purchase is not charged one.

The minimum balance to order

Hourly Min Balance, in Settings → Billing → Automation → Credit Settings, is the balance a customer must already hold before they can place an hourly order at all. Below it, checkout is refused with a message naming both the minimum required and their current balance, shown as Credit Required for Hourly Billing. Check the value in your own panel before you announce a price — it is the first thing a new customer hits.

How usage is charged

A sweep runs every hour, on the hour, in UTC. One pass does five things in this order:

1. Charge every eligible hourly service for the hour.
2. Run automatic credit top-ups.
3. Suspend services that can no longer pay.
4. Terminate services that have been suspended long enough.
5. Send low-balance warnings.

The top-up step sits deliberately before the suspension step, so a customer whose card works is topped up and never suspended within the same hour.

What one charge covers

• The service’s own hourly rate, plus any active recurring add-ons priced hourly, multiplied by their quantities.
• Tax on top, at the customer’s rate. The amount taken from the balance is the gross figure, and the ledger line says so — it reads Hourly charge, the service name and (incl. VAT). See VAT and Tax on Your Documents.
• One ledger entry per service per hour. A service already charged within the current clock hour is skipped, so a restart mid-hour never double-charges.

Services are charged cheapest first. On a thin balance that keeps the greatest number of services running.

Pay at the start, not in arrears

The first hour is deducted at the moment the order is placed, before any sweep runs. Because the sweep charges by clock hour, an order placed at 14:30 is charged again at 15:00 — the first “hour” can be much shorter than an hour. Tell customers this if they compare their first two charges and expect a gap of sixty minutes.

Upgrades work the same way: there is no proration credit or catch-up charge on an hourly service, only the flat upgrade fee if the product carries one. The new rate simply applies from the next hourly tick.

Which services are metered

• Only services with the status Active and a rate above zero are charged. A Suspended service is not charged — a customer who runs out of credit stops accruing cost.
• A powered-off virtual server is still charged. The resource stays reserved, so metering continues. Customers who expect “stopped means free” need to be told to cancel, not to shut down.
• A stopped game server is the one exception, and only if you choose it: switch off Bill stopped game servers in the Game servers sub-section and a stopped server is not metered, is never suspended for low credit and gets no low-balance warning, while its world data stays on disk. That toggle ships on, which means stopped game servers keep billing until you change it.

Warning: the Billing Exempt flag on a service does not apply to hourly billing. An hourly service marked exempt is still charged, still suspended and still terminated by the hour. To stop billing an hourly service, move it to a fixed cycle or cancel it.

When the balance is short

The balance can never go negative. If it cannot cover the next gross hour, the charge is simply not taken — that hour is skipped and is never recovered later, and no debt is recorded anywhere. The service keeps running until the suspension step of the same pass, or a later one, catches it.

Affordability is always judged on the gross rate including tax, so a customer sitting between the net and the gross figure is correctly treated as short rather than being charged and failing.

The monthly price cap

Monthly price cap, in the Game servers sub-section, applies to hourly services generally: with it on, a service never costs more within one calendar month (UTC) than its product’s monthly price plus its add-ons. The last charge before the ceiling is trimmed to land exactly on it; after that the rest of the month is free, and the service cannot be suspended for running out of credit for the remainder of the month.

The cap is off as shipped, and it needs a monthly price on the product to have anything to work from. With it off, remember that the rate is derived from a 720-hour month: a 31-day month bills 744 hours, so an hourly customer running non-stop pays roughly 3% more than the monthly price. Switch the cap on if you have advertised hourly as “never more than monthly”.

Suspension and termination

Both clocks are configured in Settings → Billing → Automation → Hourly Billing, and both are counted in hours.

Hourly lifecycle compared with a fixed cycle

	Fixed cycle	Hourly
What starts the clock	An unpaid document past its due date	A balance that cannot cover the next hour
Time to suspension	Suspension Grace, in days	Suspension Grace (hours), sub-labelled After credit runs out
Time to termination	Termination Grace, in days	Termination Grace (hours), sub-labelled After suspension
Checked	Once a night	Every hour
Separate on/off switches	Auto Suspension and Auto Termination	None — Enable Hourly Billing governs the whole thing
Billing Exempt respected	Yes	No

The shipped values are 1 hour to suspension and 24 hours from suspension to termination. That is a very short runway compared with a fixed-cycle service: a customer who lets their balance empty overnight can lose the service the next day. Set both deliberately.

How the suspension grace is measured

The grace is counted from the last successful hourly charge, not from the moment the balance emptied. With a one-hour grace, suspension lands on the first sweep at least an hour after the last hour the customer actually paid for.

A service that has never had a successful hourly charge on record has no starting point for the grace, and is suspended on the first sweep that finds it short.

Suspension powers a virtual server off and hands other service types to their integration to suspend in their own way. The reason recorded is that the credit balance was insufficient, and the customer is emailed Service Suspended with their balance and the minimum required, plus an Add Funds Now button.

Termination

Every hour, any suspended hourly service that has been suspended longer than Termination Grace (hours) is terminated. No separate email is sent by this step.

Warning: for a virtual server this is destructive. Termination destroys the machine and wipes its disk, with no retention window. Combined with the shipped one-hour suspension grace, a customer can go from an empty balance to permanently lost data inside 25 hours. Decide what runway your business wants to give and set both fields accordingly before you sell your first hourly service.

Holding a service back

Do Not Suspend Until, on the individual service page, stops both the hourly suspension and the hourly termination sweep until the date passes. It does not stop the hourly charge — money is still deducted whenever the balance can cover it. Use it to buy a customer time, not to stop billing them.

Low-balance warnings

Switch on Low Credit Warnings and a Warning Threshold (hours) box appears, sub-labelled Warn when credit covers less than this many hours. The shipped threshold is 24 hours.

• At the end of every hourly pass, the platform divides the balance by each service’s gross hourly rate. If the result is below your threshold, a warning goes out.
• The email is Low Credit Warning, naming the service. It shows the hourly rate, the credit balance and the approximate hours remaining, with an Add Funds Now button to the billing page.
• At most one warning per service per 24 hours, repeating for as long as the balance stays low. The counter is reset when a service is restored, so a top-up followed by another drain warns again straight away.
• Services that are exempt from metering because they are stopped, or that have already hit the monthly cap, are skipped.

Note: the threshold is measured against the account balance, and one balance funds all of a customer’s hourly services. A customer running six services will see six warnings for the same shortfall. Consider a threshold generous enough that the first warning still leaves them time to act.

Restoring a suspended hourly service

Restoration is automatic and immediate, and it is triggered by money arriving — not by the hourly sweep. It happens when:

• a credit top-up the customer paid for is confirmed, whether they added funds themselves or the automatic top-up did it for them; or
• a staff member adds credit to the account by hand.

When that happens the platform walks the customer’s suspended hourly services cheapest first and brings back as many as the new balance can sustain for one hour each, subtracting an hour’s gross as it goes. A small top-up therefore restores some services rather than all of them — which is usually what the customer wants, but is worth explaining if they ask why one machine came back and another did not.

Each restored service is powered back on, its warning counter is cleared, and the customer is emailed Service Restored. This happens within seconds of the payment, not at the next hour boundary; the restored service is not charged again until the next sweep.

A service that has already been terminated cannot be restored this way. Once the termination grace has run out, adding credit does not bring the service back.

Automatic credit top-up

Automatic Credit Top-up (prepaid / hourly), in Settings → Billing → Automation, is what keeps a good customer from ever seeing a suspension. Set Top up when below, Top up to (which must be higher than the threshold) and a Cooldown in hours. When an enrolled customer’s balance falls below the trigger, their saved payment method is charged for the difference and a credit-deposit document is issued.

It runs every hour as part of the hourly pass, before the suspension check. The customer must have automatic payment enabled with an active saved method; the settings are covered in Automatic Billing and the Service Lifecycle and Credit Balance. If the charge does not complete, nothing is credited and no further attempt is made until the cooldown expires, so the suspension clock proceeds normally.

The monthly summary document

Switch on Monthly Summary Invoices and, from the 1st of each month, every customer with hourly charges in the month just ended receives one document covering them all.

• It is a receipt, not a bill. The money was already taken hour by hour from the credit balance. The document is issued already paid, with a matching payment recorded against the credit balance, and nothing is charged when it appears. In the client portal it shows the green Payment Received panel and no Pay button.
• Period. The whole of the previous calendar month, in UTC. The generator is part of the nightly run, so it fires on the 1st; if that night is missed it simply issues on the next night instead.
• One per customer per month, with one line per service. Services that were terminated during the month are still included — the usage was real.
• Line wording. Each line names the service, its hostname and address where known, the month, and the hours and rate — for example web01 — June 2026 (720 hours @ 0.0685/hr). Quantity is the number of hours, and amounts are shown to four decimal places on this document type.
• No email is sent for the summary. It appears in the customer’s billing list; tell customers where to find it if they expect a notification.

If you issue proformas rather than invoices, the summary is created as a paid proforma and converted to the invoice immediately, so the customer still ends up with one paid invoice for the month.

Running it by hand

At the foot of the Hourly Billing card, Generate previous month now with its Run now button runs the generator for the previous month on demand. It is safe to re-run: if a summary already exists it reports Already generated for this period — no duplicates created, and if there were no hourly charges it says so.

Where usage is visible

There is no hours-used or estimated-cost panel on the service page. Usage is read from the credit ledger, where the hourly entries are collapsed for readability:

• The customer looks under Billing → Credit History. Each service’s month appears as a single row naming the service, hostname and address, with N hours · Month Year and the summed amount. View N hours opens the individual charges.
• You see the same grouping on the client’s Credits tab under Transaction History, with a View service link alongside. The grouping is display only; the underlying entries are untouched. See Credit Balance for what deleting a grouped month does.
• Elsewhere in the client portal an hourly service shows its rate to four decimals with /hr, and where a fixed-cycle service shows a next due date it shows Billing with the value Credit-based.

When a customer cancels an hourly service the portal warns them that it is powered off and deleted immediately, and that the month’s accumulated usage will appear on the next monthly summary.

Settings at a glance

Hourly billing controls

Control	Where	What it does
Enable Hourly Billing	Billing → Automation → Hourly Billing	Governs hourly charging, suspension, termination and warnings, and whether the hourly option appears in the category editor.
Suspension Grace (hours)	Hourly Billing	Hours from the last paid hour before a short service is suspended. Ships as 1.
Termination Grace (hours)	Hourly Billing	Hours from suspension to termination. Ships as 24.
Low Credit Warnings and Warning Threshold (hours)	Hourly Billing	Warn a customer whose balance covers fewer than this many hours. The threshold box only appears when the toggle is on.
Monthly Summary Invoices	Hourly Billing	Issues the already-paid monthly summary from the 1st.
Bill stopped game servers	Hourly Billing → Game servers	On: a stopped game server keeps billing. Off: it is not metered, not suspended and not warned about.
Monthly price cap	Hourly Billing → Game servers	Caps a calendar month’s hourly charges at the product’s monthly price. Off as shipped.
Hourly Min Balance	Billing → Automation → Credit Settings	Balance a customer must hold before an hourly order is accepted.
Automatic Credit Top-up	Billing → Automation	Recharges a falling balance from the customer’s saved payment method each hour.
Hourly price	Product category → Billing Cycles	Offers the hourly cycle for that category’s products.
Hourly price	Product → Pricing	The rate itself. Leave blank to derive it from the monthly price.

Common questions

A customer stopped their server — why are they still being charged?

Because the resources are still reserved for them. Only a stopped game server can be exempted, and only when Bill stopped game servers is off. To stop paying, the customer has to cancel the service.

Can an hourly customer end up owing money?

No. Charges stop the moment the balance cannot cover the next hour, and the balance never goes below zero. What you lose is the unbilled hour, not the customer’s payment.

Why does the monthly summary total differ slightly from the sum of the hourly deductions?

The deductions are taken gross, hour by hour, at four decimal places. The summary rebuilds net amounts and recalculates tax on the totals, so rounding can move the figure by a fraction of a unit.

Do hourly services get renewal documents or reminders?

No. They are excluded from renewal generation, from invoice reminders and from the renewal reminder email. The monthly summary is the only document they produce.

Related articles

Credit Balance, Automatic Billing and the Service Lifecycle, Billing, Products, Product Categories, Service Details, VAT and Tax on Your Documents, Invoices.