Metering and Billing Glossary · Hosting & Cloud

Affected ratio: an SLA measure that weights an outage's minutes by the share of unique visitor IPs affected, so a partial outage earns a partial credit (SLAs & Service Credits).
Alert-first provider: a provider that gives cost data and budget warnings but leaves stopping spend to the customer's own automation (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Allowance: a quantity a subscription includes (requests, CPU-hours, rows read), held on the plan version and consumed during rating before anything is priced; not a credit (Metering & Rating).
Always free: a monthly allowance per meter that resets each period, in effect a negative price on the first units of a meter, every month, forever (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Anomaly detection (cost): flagging spend that departs from an account's pattern; actionable only if it names the project, SKU or region that changed, and worth most when it runs on provisional hourly rating (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Attributes (SKU): the descriptive properties of a SKU for humans and tools (vCPUs, memory, storage class, operating system, tenancy), as distinct from the SKU code that billing points at (Pricing Catalogs).
Automatic non-billing: an SLA remedy that simply doesn't charge for unavailable hours, with no claim needed, applied as a correction during rating rather than as a credit (SLAs & Service Credits).
Automatic renewal law (state): state statutes on auto-renewing consumer contracts, such as California's, with their own disclosure, reminder and cancellation rules, versioned as rule rows by jurisdiction and consent date (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Bill pipeline: the ordered stages from usage events to invoice (rating, allowances, commitments, credits, tax, rounding), in which discounts never edit rated usage and nothing is rounded before the invoice line (Metering & Rating).
Billing mode: a contract fact on the account deciding how it pays: self_serve charged automatically, invoiced with net terms, or billed_by_parent through a reseller or organization (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Breakage: the value of credits that expire unused, computed and reported to finance by cohort rather than posted by the product; the order credits expire in changes it (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Budget: an amount, a scope, a period, a cost basis, thresholds that alert and optionally an action; providers word budgets as alerts and customers often read them as limits (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Budget actions: AWS's mechanism that applies a policy or stops resources when a budget threshold is crossed, opt-in and customer-configured (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Capacity minutes: an SLA measure for capacity reservations counting minutes a reserved unit can't be allocated after a supported deployment (SLAs & Service Credits).
Capped price: a price shape that is flat until a period ceiling per resource, such as a monthly cap on an hourly server price (Pricing Catalogs).
Cascade (reseller): applying a non-paying reseller's hold to its sub-accounts' resources, at once for no_new_resources and only after notice for stronger effects (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Charge date as cancellation deadline: the rule that a renewal reminder must arrive before the card is charged, not before expiry, because the charge is the last moment the customer can stop it (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
charge_lead_days: the plan version column that makes an early renewal charge explicit and anchors reminders and invoice runs on the charge rather than the expiry (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Click-to-cancel: the FTC's 2024 amendments to the Negative Option Rule that would have made a federal cancellation standard, vacated by the Eighth Circuit in July 2025; the FTC restored the 1973 text in 2026 (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Commitment drawdown (marketplace): the selling point of cloud marketplaces: a customer with an unmet spend commitment buys a vendor's software and retires commitment at the same time (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Committed use discount (CUD): Google's commitment discount, spend-based (an hourly dollar amount across projects the billing account pays for) or resource-based (bought for a project) (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Connectivity minutes: an SLA measure counting minutes a resource has no external connectivity (for multi-zone commitments, every instance in two or more zones at once) (SLAs & Service Credits).
Consumed Quantity and Pricing Quantity: the FOCUS split between what a meter measured and the unit the price applies to, which is where minimums, increments and package sizes show (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Contracting entity versus billing entity: the split in which one legal entity is party to the terms and disputes while another numbers invoices and charges tax (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Correction (usage): a new event that restates a wrong one through corrects_id, carrying the full corrected quantity (zero to void), never an update or a subtraction (Metering & Rating).
Cost export: the provider's rated usage, discounts, credits, taxes and fees as one row per charge, delivered on a schedule to the customer's storage and restated as rating changes (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Counter (meter kind): a meter of how many times something happened (requests, rows read, segments, tokens), aggregated by sum (Metering & Rating).
Credit balance with expiry: a free offer bounded by an amount and a clock, easy to void and booked as a liability with breakage (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Credit exhaustion cap: a spend cap where nothing else can be billed by construction, because the account has no payment method or can't be charged once credit runs out (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Credit tier (SLA): the percentage of the affected service's fee credited for a period, chosen by the lowest tier the measured uptime falls below (SLAs & Service Credits).
credit_grants: the table of credits issued to an account (promotional, startup, SLA, goodwill, commitment shortfall), each with its amount, scope, exclusions and expiry, drawn down by invoice lines (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
CUR (Cost and Usage Report): AWS's native line-item cost export, carrying every provider-specific column, as opposed to the cross-provider FOCUS format (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Cycle invoice: the regular invoice for usage in arrears for the period plus recurring charges in advance where the plan bills that way, issued on the cycle date (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Data after termination: the window after an account ends during which content is retained and retrievable, published by each provider and sometimes conditioned on payment (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Digital services tax: a tax aimed at platforms, advertising and marketplaces rather than infrastructure rent, different from withholding tax on cloud payments (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Dimensions (meter): the attributes on a usage event (region, operating system, carrier, direction, storage class, model, outcome) that split one meter into many prices and decide the SKU (Metering & Rating).
Dispute (invoice): a record against invoice lines that pauses interest and dunning for those lines only, setting a dunning case to paused rather than closing it (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Dunning: the schedule of payment retries, notices and grace after a failed payment, stored as rows with offsets per billing mode and escalating by adding stronger holds (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Duration (meter kind): a meter of how long something existed or ran (instance-seconds, GPU-hours, address-hours), aggregated as the overlap of each lifetime with the window (Metering & Rating).
Effective events: the usage events rated for a window: those in it, received before the run's cutoff and not superseded by a later correction (Metering & Rating).
Electronically supplied service (EU VAT): a service on the EU's Implementing Regulation 282/2011 Annex I list, which includes website and webpage hosting, taxed where a consumer is (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Error-rate intervals: an SLA measure averaging server errors over requests in each five-minute interval of the month, with empty intervals at 0% (SLAs & Service Credits).
Error-rate threshold: an SLA measure that counts minutes only when more than a set share of valid requests fail for consecutive minutes with the client backing off (SLAs & Service Credits).
ERRP clock (domains): the pre-expiry and post-expiry notices ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy requires, generated as a second rule set beside consumer renewal rules on the same subscription (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Exemption certificate: a customer's tax exemption document, held with its expiry and review status and checked at invoicing (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Flat price: the simplest price shape, quantity times unit price, used for instance-seconds, segments and most usage (Pricing Catalogs).
FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification): the FinOps Foundation's common cost export format with List Cost, Effective Cost and Billed Cost columns, readable across providers (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Forgiveness (surprise bill): choosing not to collect for usage that was real, recorded as a goodwill credit grant, as distinct from fixing a faulty meter by rerating (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Gauge (meter kind): a meter of a level held over time (stored GB, provisioned memory), aggregated as a time-weighted average and converted to GB-months or GB-hours (Metering & Rating).
Graduated tiers: a price shape in which each volume band is priced at its own rate and the bands are summed (Metering & Rating).
Gross-up: a contract clause under which a customer whose country withholds tax still owes the provider the full invoice amount, so a short payment equal to the withholding rate stays owed (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Hard cap (spending limit): a limit that stops spend rather than alerting, implemented as an account hold when provisional spend reaches the limit; sold as hard, any overshoot is credited (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Hourly spend commitment: a dollar-per-hour promise for a term (AWS Savings Plans, Azure savings plans, Google spend-based CUDs), in which each hour's eligible usage is priced at commitment rates and unused commitment is lost (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Idempotency key (usage event): the producer's key on every event, unique per source, so a replayed batch inserts nothing and duplicates are a no-op (Metering & Rating).
Invoice run: a batch job with a period, a cutoff and a seller that turns rated usage, commitments and credits into numbered, taxed invoices for every account, idempotent and resumable (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Invoiced net terms: billing large accounts by invoice payable within a contractual period, with receivables, late payers and collections, instead of charging a card (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Involuntary churn: customers lost to failed payment rather than cancellation, reported as its own metric because its fix is billing, not product (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Late interest: a contractual rate and trigger for overdue invoices, charged as an adjustment line on a later invoice and never as a change to the late one (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Lateness window: how late a usage event may arrive and still rate into its own period, stated per meter (meters.lateness_window); events after the cutoff go to the next run as adjustments (Metering & Rating).
Lease tax (Chicago): Chicago's Lease Transaction Tax, which the City's Ruling #12 applied to charges under a "non-possessory computer lease", reaching cloud compute; an effective-dated rate the City changes with its budgets (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
List, Effective and Billed Cost: the three costs per cost-export row: what usage would cost at list, what it cost with commitment purchases amortized, and what the customer is billed (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Listing fee: a cloud marketplace's share of a vendor's sale, set by offer type and contract value and frozen at acceptance; the provider's revenue is the fee, not the line (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
MACC (Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment): a contractual commitment to a level of Azure spending over a period, tracked by remaining balance and eligible spend, with statuses Active, Complete, Expired and Canceled (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Marketplace (cloud): a provider's catalog of third-party software billed on the provider's invoice, where the vendor's charge is a pass-through line and eligible purchases count toward commitments (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Merchant of record: a third party that sells on a provider's behalf and takes on the registrations and filings, for a fee per transaction (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Meter: a named measurement with a unit, a way of aggregating it and the dimensions that can split it; a SKU rates a meter, and several SKUs can rate the same one (Metering & Rating).
Meter registry: the contract between service teams and billing: a new meter is a row with an owner, kind, allowed dimensions and lateness window before any event may name it (Metering & Rating).
Milestone (commitment): an optional intermediate spend target with a due date and amount inside an enterprise commitment, whose miss can trigger a shortfall (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Minimum and increment: the per-session billing rules (a one-minute minimum, per-second or per-minute rounding) a SKU applies, charged once per launch or job rather than per hour (Metering & Rating).
Monthly cap: a ceiling at which an hourly charge stops for the month, such as a server never billed above its monthly price (Metering & Rating).
Negative Option Rule: the FTC's 1973 rule on prenotification plans, the book-club model, which the FTC's later amendments sought to extend to all negative option offers (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
No setoff: the contract rule that a customer pays the invoice in full even if it believes it is owed an SLA credit, which arrives separately through the SLA process (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Notice (price change): the record of when a price change was announced, through which channels and to which affected accounts, enforced so an effective date before the required notice can't be inserted (Pricing Catalogs).
One Stop Shop (OSS): the EU scheme, since July 2021, letting a seller file one quarterly VAT return for consumer sales across all member states (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Package price: a price shape charged per block with partial blocks rounded up, such as traffic overage in fixed blocks or credit packs (Pricing Catalogs).
Partial invoice (threshold): an invoice issued mid-cycle when accrued usage crosses the account's threshold; partial and end-of-cycle invoices must add up to the period without double billing (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Pass-through fee: a supplier's charge (carrier, registry, regulatory, marketplace vendor) billed on its own SKU and rated as a separate row from the same event, so it never blends into the provider's margin (Metering & Rating).
Period-close run: the authoritative rating run for a period that rerates all effective events with tiers, caps and allowances applied over the whole period, superseding the provisional hourly runs (Metering & Rating).
Price book: a set of price versions (list, a contract, a commitment's rates); rating looks in the account's contract book first, then list (Pricing Catalogs).
Price version: an effective-dated price for a SKU in a price book and currency, with its tier shape; a price change is a new version with an announcement, boundary, audience and notice obligation (Pricing Catalogs).
Pricing page as truth: the rule that the page, API, calculator, checkout and rater all render the same price rows, because the published page wins every dispute (Pricing Catalogs).
Private offer: a negotiated marketplace price and contract terms for one buyer, sometimes through a channel partner who records its own margin (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Proportional credit: an SLA remedy that matches the credit to the measured damage, allowing a headline 100% promise that pays little (SLAs & Service Credits).
rated_usage: the rating output per run: billable quantity after minimums, the part an allowance covered, and the unrounded amount, which commitments and credits point at rather than edit (Metering & Rating).
Rating: the deterministic function that turns the effective events for a window, the SKUs that match them and the price versions in force when usage happened into money, written to rated_usage unrounded (Metering & Rating).
Renewal price: the list price a plan renews at after its intro term, a material term to disclose before billing, often several times the intro price (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Rerating: fixing a price, a rule or a batch of events by a new rating run that supersedes the old one for its scope, with the diff as the evidence for a disputed bill (Metering & Rating).
Reserved Instance: a commitment to a specific resource (instance type, region) for a term in exchange for a discount, applied before savings plans (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Reverse charge: the B2B VAT rule under which the business customer, not the seller, accounts for VAT on a cross-border service (Article 196 of the VAT Directive) (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
ROSCA (Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act): the US federal law (15 U.S.C. 8403) requiring clear disclosure of material terms before billing information is collected, express informed consent and simple mechanisms to stop recurring charges (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Savings Plans: AWS's dollar-per-hour commitment for one or three years, as Compute Savings Plans across families, Regions and services or EC2 Instance Savings Plans for one family in one Region (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Seller entity (seller of record): the legal entity that sells to an account and whose registrations, invoice series and tax rules apply, assigned from address data and changeable only for future invoices (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Service-level cap: a spend cap that stops new usage of one service in one project while in-flight requests and persistent resources continue (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Shortfall charge: the amount owed when an enterprise spend commitment or milestone isn't met, recorded as an invoice line and a credit grant of kind commitment_shortfall (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
SKU: one billable unit with one meter, such as one instance type in one region on one operating system per second; its code is permanent and a discontinued SKU is retired, never deleted (Pricing Catalogs).
SLA (service level agreement): a price adjustment, not a promise of uptime: a published definition of uptime with credit tiers, exclusions and a claim process, usually the customer's sole remedy (SLAs & Service Credits).
SLA versus SLO: the difference between the contractual measure a provider credits against and its internal objective; the error budget must use the published definition to predict credit exposure (SLAs & Service Credits).
Sole remedy: the SLA clause making service credits the customer's only remedy for downtime, alongside exclusions for causes outside the provider's control, the customer's doing, previews, throttling, suspension and maintenance (SLAs & Service Credits).
Spend commitment (total): a dollar total over a term, sometimes with milestones, that eligible invoiced spend decrements, in exchange for a discount on everything (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Spot capacity: the provider's idle buffer sold at a discount with a recall clause, interrupted with short or no notice when capacity is needed, recorded as the end of the resource's lifetime (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Startup program: a credit with a sponsor, often an investor whose identifier unlocks it, sized up to six figures, with exclusions enforced at application time (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Stop-first provider: a provider or plan that pauses or stops usage at a limit (free plans, credit subscriptions, optional budget pauses) rather than only alerting (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Suspension clock: the published days from non-payment to suspension, termination and data deletion, stored on the account hold so notices quote the same dates the system enforces (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Sustained use discount: Google's automatic discount for running a resource much of the month, delivered as monthly credits and not applied to usage a commitment already covers (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Tax location: the basis recorded on each invoice for where the customer is (tax ID country, matching card, billing or contact address), chosen by a published precedence (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Threshold billing: charging a new or risky account mid-cycle whenever accrued usage crosses a per-account threshold that rises with payment history; a threshold collects money and is not a spend cap (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Trial: full or restricted access for a period, a clock that ends in a decision; a trial that converts to paid without a new act is an automatic renewal under state law (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Turn off auto-renew: the toggle many providers use to end a plan at term end, which is legally and in the data a cancellation (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Unavailable minutes with a floor: an SLA measure that counts API unavailability only in outages longer than a minimum continuous duration (SLAs & Service Credits).
Usage time: the time usage happened, which picks the price version, as opposed to processing time, so a rerun next quarter prices the same way (Metering & Rating).
USF recovery line: the provider's recovery of its Universal Service contribution, billed as a regulatory pass-through SKU on the interstate share of revenue rather than as a tax line (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
VAT ID validation: checking a customer's VAT number, the trigger for reverse charge, with a pending or unverifiable state when the validation service doesn't answer (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Volume tiers: a price shape in which the whole quantity takes the rate of the band it ends in (Metering & Rating).
Withdrawal right: the consumer right to withdraw from a distance contract within a set period, which a provider starting service at once must handle inside a prepaid term (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Withholding tax: tax a customer's country deducts from a cross-border payment to the provider, which a provider can avoid with a local entity or offset by grossing up (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).

Affected ratio: an SLA measure that weights an outage's minutes by the share of unique visitor IPs affected, so a partial outage earns a partial credit (SLAs & Service Credits).
Alert-first provider: a provider that gives cost data and budget warnings but leaves stopping spend to the customer's own automation (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Allowance: a quantity a subscription includes (requests, CPU-hours, rows read), held on the plan version and consumed during rating before anything is priced; not a credit (Metering & Rating).
Always free: a monthly allowance per meter that resets each period, in effect a negative price on the first units of a meter, every month, forever (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Anomaly detection (cost): flagging spend that departs from an account's pattern; actionable only if it names the project, SKU or region that changed, and worth most when it runs on provisional hourly rating (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Attributes (SKU): the descriptive properties of a SKU for humans and tools (vCPUs, memory, storage class, operating system, tenancy), as distinct from the SKU code that billing points at (Pricing Catalogs).
Automatic non-billing: an SLA remedy that simply doesn't charge for unavailable hours, with no claim needed, applied as a correction during rating rather than as a credit (SLAs & Service Credits).
Automatic renewal law (state): state statutes on auto-renewing consumer contracts, such as California's, with their own disclosure, reminder and cancellation rules, versioned as rule rows by jurisdiction and consent date (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Bill pipeline: the ordered stages from usage events to invoice (rating, allowances, commitments, credits, tax, rounding), in which discounts never edit rated usage and nothing is rounded before the invoice line (Metering & Rating).
Billing mode: a contract fact on the account deciding how it pays: self_serve charged automatically, invoiced with net terms, or billed_by_parent through a reseller or organization (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Breakage: the value of credits that expire unused, computed and reported to finance by cohort rather than posted by the product; the order credits expire in changes it (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Budget: an amount, a scope, a period, a cost basis, thresholds that alert and optionally an action; providers word budgets as alerts and customers often read them as limits (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Budget actions: AWS's mechanism that applies a policy or stops resources when a budget threshold is crossed, opt-in and customer-configured (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Capacity minutes: an SLA measure for capacity reservations counting minutes a reserved unit can't be allocated after a supported deployment (SLAs & Service Credits).
Capped price: a price shape that is flat until a period ceiling per resource, such as a monthly cap on an hourly server price (Pricing Catalogs).
Cascade (reseller): applying a non-paying reseller's hold to its sub-accounts' resources, at once for no_new_resources and only after notice for stronger effects (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Charge date as cancellation deadline: the rule that a renewal reminder must arrive before the card is charged, not before expiry, because the charge is the last moment the customer can stop it (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
charge_lead_days: the plan version column that makes an early renewal charge explicit and anchors reminders and invoice runs on the charge rather than the expiry (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Click-to-cancel: the FTC's 2024 amendments to the Negative Option Rule that would have made a federal cancellation standard, vacated by the Eighth Circuit in July 2025; the FTC restored the 1973 text in 2026 (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Commitment drawdown (marketplace): the selling point of cloud marketplaces: a customer with an unmet spend commitment buys a vendor's software and retires commitment at the same time (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Committed use discount (CUD): Google's commitment discount, spend-based (an hourly dollar amount across projects the billing account pays for) or resource-based (bought for a project) (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Connectivity minutes: an SLA measure counting minutes a resource has no external connectivity (for multi-zone commitments, every instance in two or more zones at once) (SLAs & Service Credits).
Consumed Quantity and Pricing Quantity: the FOCUS split between what a meter measured and the unit the price applies to, which is where minimums, increments and package sizes show (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Contracting entity versus billing entity: the split in which one legal entity is party to the terms and disputes while another numbers invoices and charges tax (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Correction (usage): a new event that restates a wrong one through corrects_id, carrying the full corrected quantity (zero to void), never an update or a subtraction (Metering & Rating).
Cost export: the provider's rated usage, discounts, credits, taxes and fees as one row per charge, delivered on a schedule to the customer's storage and restated as rating changes (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Counter (meter kind): a meter of how many times something happened (requests, rows read, segments, tokens), aggregated by sum (Metering & Rating).
Credit balance with expiry: a free offer bounded by an amount and a clock, easy to void and booked as a liability with breakage (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Credit exhaustion cap: a spend cap where nothing else can be billed by construction, because the account has no payment method or can't be charged once credit runs out (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Credit tier (SLA): the percentage of the affected service's fee credited for a period, chosen by the lowest tier the measured uptime falls below (SLAs & Service Credits).
credit_grants: the table of credits issued to an account (promotional, startup, SLA, goodwill, commitment shortfall), each with its amount, scope, exclusions and expiry, drawn down by invoice lines (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
CUR (Cost and Usage Report): AWS's native line-item cost export, carrying every provider-specific column, as opposed to the cross-provider FOCUS format (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Cycle invoice: the regular invoice for usage in arrears for the period plus recurring charges in advance where the plan bills that way, issued on the cycle date (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Data after termination: the window after an account ends during which content is retained and retrievable, published by each provider and sometimes conditioned on payment (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Digital services tax: a tax aimed at platforms, advertising and marketplaces rather than infrastructure rent, different from withholding tax on cloud payments (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Dimensions (meter): the attributes on a usage event (region, operating system, carrier, direction, storage class, model, outcome) that split one meter into many prices and decide the SKU (Metering & Rating).
Dispute (invoice): a record against invoice lines that pauses interest and dunning for those lines only, setting a dunning case to paused rather than closing it (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Dunning: the schedule of payment retries, notices and grace after a failed payment, stored as rows with offsets per billing mode and escalating by adding stronger holds (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Duration (meter kind): a meter of how long something existed or ran (instance-seconds, GPU-hours, address-hours), aggregated as the overlap of each lifetime with the window (Metering & Rating).
Effective events: the usage events rated for a window: those in it, received before the run's cutoff and not superseded by a later correction (Metering & Rating).
Electronically supplied service (EU VAT): a service on the EU's Implementing Regulation 282/2011 Annex I list, which includes website and webpage hosting, taxed where a consumer is (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Error-rate intervals: an SLA measure averaging server errors over requests in each five-minute interval of the month, with empty intervals at 0% (SLAs & Service Credits).
Error-rate threshold: an SLA measure that counts minutes only when more than a set share of valid requests fail for consecutive minutes with the client backing off (SLAs & Service Credits).
ERRP clock (domains): the pre-expiry and post-expiry notices ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy requires, generated as a second rule set beside consumer renewal rules on the same subscription (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Exemption certificate: a customer's tax exemption document, held with its expiry and review status and checked at invoicing (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Flat price: the simplest price shape, quantity times unit price, used for instance-seconds, segments and most usage (Pricing Catalogs).
FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification): the FinOps Foundation's common cost export format with List Cost, Effective Cost and Billed Cost columns, readable across providers (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Forgiveness (surprise bill): choosing not to collect for usage that was real, recorded as a goodwill credit grant, as distinct from fixing a faulty meter by rerating (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Gauge (meter kind): a meter of a level held over time (stored GB, provisioned memory), aggregated as a time-weighted average and converted to GB-months or GB-hours (Metering & Rating).
Graduated tiers: a price shape in which each volume band is priced at its own rate and the bands are summed (Metering & Rating).
Gross-up: a contract clause under which a customer whose country withholds tax still owes the provider the full invoice amount, so a short payment equal to the withholding rate stays owed (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Hard cap (spending limit): a limit that stops spend rather than alerting, implemented as an account hold when provisional spend reaches the limit; sold as hard, any overshoot is credited (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Hourly spend commitment: a dollar-per-hour promise for a term (AWS Savings Plans, Azure savings plans, Google spend-based CUDs), in which each hour's eligible usage is priced at commitment rates and unused commitment is lost (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Idempotency key (usage event): the producer's key on every event, unique per source, so a replayed batch inserts nothing and duplicates are a no-op (Metering & Rating).
Invoice run: a batch job with a period, a cutoff and a seller that turns rated usage, commitments and credits into numbered, taxed invoices for every account, idempotent and resumable (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Invoiced net terms: billing large accounts by invoice payable within a contractual period, with receivables, late payers and collections, instead of charging a card (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Involuntary churn: customers lost to failed payment rather than cancellation, reported as its own metric because its fix is billing, not product (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Late interest: a contractual rate and trigger for overdue invoices, charged as an adjustment line on a later invoice and never as a change to the late one (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Lateness window: how late a usage event may arrive and still rate into its own period, stated per meter (meters.lateness_window); events after the cutoff go to the next run as adjustments (Metering & Rating).
Lease tax (Chicago): Chicago's Lease Transaction Tax, which the City's Ruling #12 applied to charges under a "non-possessory computer lease", reaching cloud compute; an effective-dated rate the City changes with its budgets (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
List, Effective and Billed Cost: the three costs per cost-export row: what usage would cost at list, what it cost with commitment purchases amortized, and what the customer is billed (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Listing fee: a cloud marketplace's share of a vendor's sale, set by offer type and contract value and frozen at acceptance; the provider's revenue is the fee, not the line (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
MACC (Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment): a contractual commitment to a level of Azure spending over a period, tracked by remaining balance and eligible spend, with statuses Active, Complete, Expired and Canceled (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Marketplace (cloud): a provider's catalog of third-party software billed on the provider's invoice, where the vendor's charge is a pass-through line and eligible purchases count toward commitments (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Merchant of record: a third party that sells on a provider's behalf and takes on the registrations and filings, for a fee per transaction (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Meter: a named measurement with a unit, a way of aggregating it and the dimensions that can split it; a SKU rates a meter, and several SKUs can rate the same one (Metering & Rating).
Meter registry: the contract between service teams and billing: a new meter is a row with an owner, kind, allowed dimensions and lateness window before any event may name it (Metering & Rating).
Milestone (commitment): an optional intermediate spend target with a due date and amount inside an enterprise commitment, whose miss can trigger a shortfall (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Minimum and increment: the per-session billing rules (a one-minute minimum, per-second or per-minute rounding) a SKU applies, charged once per launch or job rather than per hour (Metering & Rating).
Monthly cap: a ceiling at which an hourly charge stops for the month, such as a server never billed above its monthly price (Metering & Rating).
Negative Option Rule: the FTC's 1973 rule on prenotification plans, the book-club model, which the FTC's later amendments sought to extend to all negative option offers (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
No setoff: the contract rule that a customer pays the invoice in full even if it believes it is owed an SLA credit, which arrives separately through the SLA process (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Notice (price change): the record of when a price change was announced, through which channels and to which affected accounts, enforced so an effective date before the required notice can't be inserted (Pricing Catalogs).
One Stop Shop (OSS): the EU scheme, since July 2021, letting a seller file one quarterly VAT return for consumer sales across all member states (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Package price: a price shape charged per block with partial blocks rounded up, such as traffic overage in fixed blocks or credit packs (Pricing Catalogs).
Partial invoice (threshold): an invoice issued mid-cycle when accrued usage crosses the account's threshold; partial and end-of-cycle invoices must add up to the period without double billing (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Pass-through fee: a supplier's charge (carrier, registry, regulatory, marketplace vendor) billed on its own SKU and rated as a separate row from the same event, so it never blends into the provider's margin (Metering & Rating).
Period-close run: the authoritative rating run for a period that rerates all effective events with tiers, caps and allowances applied over the whole period, superseding the provisional hourly runs (Metering & Rating).
Price book: a set of price versions (list, a contract, a commitment's rates); rating looks in the account's contract book first, then list (Pricing Catalogs).
Price version: an effective-dated price for a SKU in a price book and currency, with its tier shape; a price change is a new version with an announcement, boundary, audience and notice obligation (Pricing Catalogs).
Pricing page as truth: the rule that the page, API, calculator, checkout and rater all render the same price rows, because the published page wins every dispute (Pricing Catalogs).
Private offer: a negotiated marketplace price and contract terms for one buyer, sometimes through a channel partner who records its own margin (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Proportional credit: an SLA remedy that matches the credit to the measured damage, allowing a headline 100% promise that pays little (SLAs & Service Credits).
rated_usage: the rating output per run: billable quantity after minimums, the part an allowance covered, and the unrounded amount, which commitments and credits point at rather than edit (Metering & Rating).
Rating: the deterministic function that turns the effective events for a window, the SKUs that match them and the price versions in force when usage happened into money, written to rated_usage unrounded (Metering & Rating).
Renewal price: the list price a plan renews at after its intro term, a material term to disclose before billing, often several times the intro price (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Rerating: fixing a price, a rule or a batch of events by a new rating run that supersedes the old one for its scope, with the diff as the evidence for a disputed bill (Metering & Rating).
Reserved Instance: a commitment to a specific resource (instance type, region) for a term in exchange for a discount, applied before savings plans (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Reverse charge: the B2B VAT rule under which the business customer, not the seller, accounts for VAT on a cross-border service (Article 196 of the VAT Directive) (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
ROSCA (Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act): the US federal law (15 U.S.C. 8403) requiring clear disclosure of material terms before billing information is collected, express informed consent and simple mechanisms to stop recurring charges (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Savings Plans: AWS's dollar-per-hour commitment for one or three years, as Compute Savings Plans across families, Regions and services or EC2 Instance Savings Plans for one family in one Region (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Seller entity (seller of record): the legal entity that sells to an account and whose registrations, invoice series and tax rules apply, assigned from address data and changeable only for future invoices (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Service-level cap: a spend cap that stops new usage of one service in one project while in-flight requests and persistent resources continue (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Shortfall charge: the amount owed when an enterprise spend commitment or milestone isn't met, recorded as an invoice line and a credit grant of kind commitment_shortfall (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
SKU: one billable unit with one meter, such as one instance type in one region on one operating system per second; its code is permanent and a discontinued SKU is retired, never deleted (Pricing Catalogs).
SLA (service level agreement): a price adjustment, not a promise of uptime: a published definition of uptime with credit tiers, exclusions and a claim process, usually the customer's sole remedy (SLAs & Service Credits).
SLA versus SLO: the difference between the contractual measure a provider credits against and its internal objective; the error budget must use the published definition to predict credit exposure (SLAs & Service Credits).
Sole remedy: the SLA clause making service credits the customer's only remedy for downtime, alongside exclusions for causes outside the provider's control, the customer's doing, previews, throttling, suspension and maintenance (SLAs & Service Credits).
Spend commitment (total): a dollar total over a term, sometimes with milestones, that eligible invoiced spend decrements, in exchange for a discount on everything (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Spot capacity: the provider's idle buffer sold at a discount with a recall clause, interrupted with short or no notice when capacity is needed, recorded as the end of the resource's lifetime (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Startup program: a credit with a sponsor, often an investor whose identifier unlocks it, sized up to six figures, with exclusions enforced at application time (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Stop-first provider: a provider or plan that pauses or stops usage at a limit (free plans, credit subscriptions, optional budget pauses) rather than only alerting (Cost Data, FinOps & Surprise Bills).
Suspension clock: the published days from non-payment to suspension, termination and data deletion, stored on the account hold so notices quote the same dates the system enforces (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Sustained use discount: Google's automatic discount for running a resource much of the month, delivered as monthly credits and not applied to usage a commitment already covers (Commitments, Discounts & Marketplaces).
Tax location: the basis recorded on each invoice for where the customer is (tax ID country, matching card, billing or contact address), chosen by a published precedence (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Threshold billing: charging a new or risky account mid-cycle whenever accrued usage crosses a per-account threshold that rises with payment history; a threshold collects money and is not a spend cap (Invoices, Dunning & Suspension).
Trial: full or restricted access for a period, a clock that ends in a decision; a trial that converts to paid without a new act is an automatic renewal under state law (Free Tiers, Credits & Startup Programs).
Turn off auto-renew: the toggle many providers use to end a plan at term end, which is legally and in the data a cancellation (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Unavailable minutes with a floor: an SLA measure that counts API unavailability only in outages longer than a minimum continuous duration (SLAs & Service Credits).
Usage time: the time usage happened, which picks the price version, as opposed to processing time, so a rerun next quarter prices the same way (Metering & Rating).
USF recovery line: the provider's recovery of its Universal Service contribution, billed as a regulatory pass-through SKU on the interstate share of revenue rather than as a tax line (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
VAT ID validation: checking a customer's VAT number, the trigger for reverse charge, with a pending or unverifiable state when the validation service doesn't answer (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).
Volume tiers: a price shape in which the whole quantity takes the rate of the band it ends in (Metering & Rating).
Withdrawal right: the consumer right to withdraw from a distance contract within a set period, which a provider starting service at once must handle inside a prepaid term (Subscriptions, Renewals & Cancellation Law).
Withholding tax: tax a customer's country deducts from a cross-border payment to the provider, which a provider can avoid with a local entity or offset by grossing up (Tax on Hosting & Cloud).