pay per use

Pay-per-use is a usage-based billing model in which only services that are used are charged for. The pay-per-use model is offered by publishers, software companies and service providers and has the advantage that the customer only pays for actual consumption or the duration of use.

With pay-per-use, also referred to as metered services, the user can access the complete range of services and unlimited resources of information, videos, computing power or other resources; however, he only pays for the time of use. The user has the advantage of no investment costs, no capital commitment, no maintenance costs, and no ongoing costs.

Inonline publishing, pay-per-use services are used for searches in information libraries or for retrieving and downloading individual journal articles, as in content billing. With this approach, online publishers try to offset their costs for their own research and journalists.

In the software sector, pay-per-use is about using current software without having to license it and load it onto one's own computer. The software is used in the cloud. The user has no acquisition costs, no capital commitment and software maintenance and always uses the latest version. Billing can be based on usage time, which is recorded by a central server.

Ininformation technology, companies can use computer resources on a pay-per-use basis. For example, to compensate for fluctuations in the use of their own computing resources. In this case, the customer has no infrastructure of his own and no computing resources that exceed the company's average computing requirements. It has the advantages of scalability, flexibility and high reliability.