Elastic Consumption Units

Elastic Cloud Hosted Serverless

All Elastic Cloud usage is metered and billed in Elastic Consumption Units (ECU). An Elastic Consumption Unit is a unit of measure for Elastic Cloud resources (capacity, data transfer, or snapshot storage).

The nominal value of one Elastic Consumption Unit is $1.00. You can use our Elastic Cloud Hosted pricing calculator or our public pricing table to estimate your costs in USD, and then apply the conversion rate of 1 ECU = $1.00 to calculate the ECU equivalent.

Your monthly usage statement is issued in ECU, though it also includes the currency equivalent of your consumption. The Usage page in the Elastic Cloud Console also shows usage information in ECU.

When you sign a prepaid consumption contract, you are purchasing Elastic Consumption Units which can be used to cover your Elastic Cloud usage throughout your contract period.

Elastic Consumption Units measure the value of your usage, as opposed to measuring the cost of the purchase, which may vary based on currency rate and discount.

Refer to our Billing FAQ for more details about prepaid consumption.

If you have an annual subscription billed using the prepaid consumption model, you can check details of your available credits on the Billing overview page, in the Available credits section.

When you buy ECU to pay for your Elastic Cloud usage, they are contracted through a purchase order consisting of one or more order lines. Each order line has a number of attributes:

Credits

The quantity of Elastic Consumption Units purchased through an order line and used to cover your consumption.

Usage

Your Elastic Cloud resource consumption quantified in ECU. Resources consumed include capacity (RAM-hours), data transfer (data inter-node and data out), and snapshot storage (storage size or snapshot API calls). These three consumption types are generally known as billing dimensions.

Remaining balance

The quantity of ECU remaining on an order line. This is calculated as the original amount of credits purchased minus the credits used so far.

Start date

The date when the credits belonging to an order line can begin to be used to offset your consumption.

Expiration date

The date until which the purchased credits are valid and can be used to offset consumption. After this date, any unused credits are forfeited.

Status

An order line can have one of the following statuses:

• Active: this means that the start date is in the past and the expiration date is in the future.
• Expired: The expiration date for the line item is before the current date.
• Future: The start date for the line item is after the current date.

List unit price

The list price paid for one ECU, in the transacted currency. This price does not include any discounts.

Discount rate

The discount percentage applied to the list unit price of one ECU.

Paid amount

The currency cost of the purchased credits. This is calculated as Credits x List unit price x (100 - Discount rate)/100.