First of all, please select your platform:

Cloudways Flexible uses the Pay-as-You-Go model; you only pay for the resources you consume. You will be invoiced for the services used in any given month at the start of the following month. You may receive an invoice between the 1st and the 6th of every month for the total resources used in the previous month.

If you have funds available in your Cloudways account, the invoice will be paid using those funds. If there are not enough funds available to pay for the entire invoice, the remaining amount will be billed to your registered credit card. You can also pay your invoice using PayPal.

To reiterate, Pay-as-You-Go means that you only pay for the resources you consume; therefore, any running servers and add-ons will incur charges.

If you have DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr servers that are stopped, the billing will still be active as resources remain allocated to your account regardless of being inactive. On the other hand, if you have AWS or GCE servers, an inactive server will incur minimal charges for disk space.

If you are looking to take a temporary break and want to stop Cloudways billing, you can read this article. If you want to cancel your Cloudways account permanently, you can read this guide.

Cloudways Autonomous uses an hourly pricing model, giving you a whole new level of flexibility and autonomy to activate, upgrade, downgrade the plan on the go and deactivate it when you no longer need it - no questions asked. You pay for the plan on an hourly basis as long as it is active, and you stop paying when you deactivate it.

For instance, if you subscribe to a $35 monthly plan, then we break down the total plan cost into per-hour cost for the whole 30 days. In other words, we divide $35 by the total number of hours in a month to calculate the hourly cost of the plan and bill you for as long as your plan is active. If you decide to use the plan only for an hour after subscribing and then deactivate it, you only pay for one hour.

You will receive monthly invoices for the plan you use in any given month at the start of the following month. You may receive an invoice between the 1st and the 6th of every month.

If you have funds available in your Cloudways account, the invoice will be paid using those funds. If there are not enough funds available to pay for the entire invoice, the remaining amount will be billed to your registered credit card. You can also pay your invoice using PayPal.

This is also applicable when you upgrade or downgrade the plan, depending on your usage. Let's take a look at another example to understand this better if you subscribe to a $35 monthly plan and use that for 15 days (360 hours) and then upgrade to a $90 plan and use that for the remaining 15 days (360 hours) of a month; then your first 15 days will be billed according to the previous plan and the remaining 15 days will be billed according to the new plan.

Let's review a small calculation to understand this example:

First Plan

Plan cost: $35

Per hour cost: $35 (plan cost) / 720 (hours) = $0.0486
​720 hours refer to 30 days

Second Plan

Plan cost: $90

Per hour cost: $90 (plan cost) / 720 (hours) = $0.125
​720 hours refer to 30 days

Thus, your invoice should be:

First 15 days: ( $0.0486 * ( 15 (days) * 24 (hours) ) = $17.496 )

Last 15 days: ( $0.125 * ( 15 (days) * 24 (hours) ) = $45 )

Total: $17.496 + $45 = $62.496

Your Cloudways plan has a fixed number of applications, monthly visits, disk space, and bandwidth. To increase your application allowance, you will need to upgrade your plan. However, if you exceed your monthly allowance for visits, disk space, and bandwidth, the overages will be billed in your next invoice. Please note that your applications will not suffer any downtime or failures due to excessive usage of resources.

Please note that your overages are automatically added to your next monthly invoice.

Monthly visit overages are charged at the rate of $1 per 1000 visits if you exceed your monthly visits quota. Here, monthly visits refer to the number of visits your site gets from unique IP addresses within 24 hours.

Let's understand monthly visit overages with an example. For instance, if your plan offers 30000 visits per month, but you exceed your monthly visits allowance by 2000 visits, then here's how you can calculate the overage fees:

( $1 (overage rate) * 2000 (monthly visits you exceeded) ) / 1000 (visits per $1) = $2

In this section, you will understand how website visits are counted and learn what is included and what is not. It's important to note that this information is pertinent to both production and staging sites.

Let's take a look at some scenarios to understand it better.

Disk overages are charged at the rate of $2 per GB per month if you exceed your disk space allocation. It is also billed hourly pro-rata (same as your plan). Your disk accommodates all your application web files, core files, and databases.

Let's understand disk overages with an example. For instance, if your plan offers 25 GB of disk space, but you exceed your disk space allowance by 2 GB, then here's how you can calculate the per day overage fees:

( $2 (overage rate) / 30 (days) ) * 2 (Size in GBs you exceeded) = $0.13/day

Bandwidth overages are charged at the rate of $1 per GB per month if you exceed your plan's bandwidth quota. Your overages will be billed to you in your next monthly invoice.

Let's understand bandwidth overages with an example. For instance, if your plan offers 200 GB of bandwidth, but you exceed your bandwidth allowance by 10 GB, then here's how you can calculate the overage:

$1 (overage rate) * 10 (Size in GBs you exceeded) = $10

If you don't wish to pay the overages moving forward, you can upgrade your plan to get more resources and allowance. Please note that when you upgrade your plan, it becomes effective immediately from that point onward. If you have incurred overages before upgrading, you will still be billed for those overage fees in your upcoming invoice.

The following payment methods are supported at Cloudways:

Please note that PayPal payments are not automated; thus, you need to manually pay your invoices using PayPal.

Cloudways offers a Real-time Billing feature that estimates your upcoming invoice based on your current usage levels. While it provides a close approximation of your billing amount, please note that it may not be 100% accurate and serves as an estimation tool rather than a precise calculation. This feature aims to help you anticipate expenses and manage your budget effectively.

When you upgrade your Cloudways account, our payment processor, Adyen, charges a $1 authorization fee to verify your credit card. Please note that this transaction will be canceled and reverted upon completion of the verification process. The same procedure is applied when you update your credit card information, and the transaction is reverted once the payment processor verifies the new credit card.

If you would like to pay your invoice using a different credit card, you can update your billing information. Alternatively, you can also pay your invoice via PayPal. You can also add funds to pay your current invoice and add extra funds to pay for your future invoices as well.

Cloudways charges in arrears for the services or plans you used in the previous month. If you cancel your account, you will still receive the last invoice if services were rendered before cancellation. For instance, if you delete all your servers/applications/add-ons and cancel your plan on January 5th, you will still receive a final invoice at the beginning of February for the five days of services used in January. Once you settle your final invoice, your account will be closed.

That’s it! We hope this article was helpful. If you need any help, then feel free to search your query on Cloudways Support Center or contact us via chat (Need a Hand > Send us a Message). Alternatively, you can also create a support ticket.