Being billed incorrectly for VM memory?

Questions / Help
1

I was looking at the billing under my personal organization and observed this small, but rather concerning-looking billing item:

I remember only using 512MB memory for Redis and terminated the app in a few hours, so I’m not sure how the 8120GB memory value is being arrived at, and I’d rather not wake up to a large billing spike.

2

Hi @biswas, I’ll start by saying this looks consistent with your Redis experiment, and you’re not being incorrectly billed.

This invoice line is confusing! We are aware of this and there are improvements in the pipeline.

That 8120 is your amount of additional RAM multiplied by the number of seconds you had it provisioned. The units are funny here (the presentation, not the calculation). Extra RAM is billed by the second.

Say you used an extra 256MB of RAM for just over 9 hours (0.25GB x 32480s = 8120 GB*s). At 1.93E-6 bucks per GB, per second, times 8120GB*s, we get $0.016, rounded up to the nearest penny: $0.02.

If you had run the extra 256MB RAM for a whole 31-day month the RAM would have cost you about $1.30. :slight_smile:

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3

Also was confused about this line in the invoice. Why is it GB/s instead of GB*s?

4

Stripe’s metered usage isn’t very flexible, so we have to bill per 1GB of memory per second you are using it. It’s very confusing to read.

5

Hi, I had related problem on this.

  1. From price table, Does additional RAM = memory_mb - the least amount of RAM for given cpu?

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  1. It looks like I’ll be charged with additional $0.15. But I’ve paid for Hobby Plan. Shouldn’t it be included in Hobby Plan $5 usage? Or additional RAM is out of included usage of any plan?

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6

Hi @QzCurious,

That’s right!

I asked internally about the preview, and on the real invoice your Hobby Plan subscription will cover your usage, including that extra RAM (up to $4.20 for February, I think, since you paid for a partial month’s subscription). The preview invoice feature hasn’t caught up.

(I’m reading the $5 as being the Hobby Plan subscription for March.)

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7

Thanks! But I’d love to sort it out more clearly.

The preview invoice feature hasn’t caught up.

  1. What you mean is that preview invoice is showing it wrong. It should somehow mark additional RAM $0.00 (like CPU does), or maybe add another row like “Hobby Plan included usage $-5.00”. Right?

  2. Only assuming for additional RAM, as long as I don’t exceed $5 for Hobby Plan, I won’t get charged over $5?

8

  1. Yes, the preview invoice is showing it wrong. It does not presently have logic to show that usage up to your subscription fee will not be charged.

  2. Right. On the Hobby Plan, you have $5/mo worth of usage included. As long as you don’t exceed $5 of resource usage (or $4.20 in this partial month), your next invoice should be only the cost of the next month’s subscription.

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