Billing modes for Cyber Protect

A billing mode is a scheme for accounting and billing for the use of services and their features. The billing mode determines what units will be used as the base for pricing calculations.

With legacy editions, you can assign only one edition per workload. As a result, your customers pay for all features that are included in an edition, even if they do not use some of them. With billing modes and advanced packs, the functionality is split in multiple offering items and enable multiple offering items per workload. The licensing engine automatically acquires the offering items depending on what features are requested in protection plans. Users can optimize the level of protection and cost by customizing their protection plans.

You can use only one billing mode or one legacy edition per tenant.

Billing modes for the Protection component

The Protection has two billing modes:

  • Per workload

  • Per gigabyte

The feature set of both billing modes is identical.

In both billing modes, the Protection service includes standard protection features that covers the majority of cyber security risks. Users can use them at no additional charge. The use of included features will be accounted, but not billed for. For a complete list of included and billable offering items, see The Cyber Protect service and advanced protection packs.

Though an advanced pack is enabled for a customer, billing will start only after the customer acquires (starts using) the features of that pack in a protection plan. When a customer selects to use some of the advanced features in a protection plan, the licensing engine automatically assigns the required license to the user.

When a user stops using an advanced feature, the license is revoked and the billing stops. The licensing engine assigns automatically the license that reflects the actual usage of the features.

You can assign licenses only for the standard Cyber Protect service features. Advanced features are billed based on the usage and their licenses cannot be modified manually. The licensing engine assigns and unassigns these licensed automatically. You can change the license type for a workload manually, but it will be reassigned when the protection plan for that workload is modified by a user.

The billing for the advanced protection features does not start when you enable them. Billing starts only after a customer starts using the advanced features in a protection plan. Enabled feature sets will be accounted and included in usage reports, but will not be billed for, unless their features are used.

Billing modes for File Sync & Share

File Sync & Share has the following billing modes:

  • Per user

  • Per gigabyte

You can also apply the billing rules of the legacy File Sync & Share edition.

Billing for Physical Data Shipping

The billing for Physical Data Shipping follows the pay-as-you-go model.

Billing for Notary

The billing for Notary follows the pay-as-you-go model.

Using the billing modes with legacy editions

For existing customer tenants, you can continue using the legacy offering items or use the offering items under one of the billing modes to replace the legacy editions. The licensing engine will automatically optimize the licenses that are assigned to the customer to minimize the billable amount.

You cannot mix editions with billing modes.

Switching from legacy editions to the new billing model

You can manually switch the offering items for your tenants by editing their profile and selecting new offering items for them. For more information about the switching process, see Switching between editions and billing modes.

To switch from editions to billing modes for multiple customers, see Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud: Mass edition switch for multiple customers (https://kb.acronis.com/content/67942).