Billing FAQs

F5 Distributed Cloud Services customers receive a monthly report detailing their current usage.

Metering refers to product usage that is tracked according to specific units. Consumption of services is tracked, and any increases in consumption of those services result in additional charges.

Billing depends on your billing program:

• AWS Pay-as-you-go for Distributed Cloud | F5 Distributed Cloud Technical Knowledge
• Term Subscription for Distributed Cloud | F5 Distributed Cloud Technical Knowledge
• Flex Consumption Program for Distributed Cloud | F5 Distributed Cloud Technical Knowledge

Purchased products have a monthly usage entitlement included in the purchase or draw from a shared entitlement pool. You can purchase additional capacity to accommodate increased monthly usage.

Your obligations for excess usage are defined in the End User Services Agreement in the section on usage metrics (F5, Inc. End User Services Agreement). If you have excess usage, your account team will work with you to right-size your subscription to cover your usage at an additional cost.

You can enable most services directly through your console by going to Catalog on the homepage. Some services may require you to work with F5 Support to enable, and your account team can help coordinate the services enablement.

Billing for usage of added services varies by buying program. Work with your partner and account team to understand the additional cost of adding a service.

• Term Subscription: Your account team will contact you in the quarter in which you started a new service to review the additional costs. Work with your partner and account team to add and co-term the services to your subscription.
• Pay-as-you-go: Billed monthly in arrears for all usage.
• Flex Consumption Program (FCP): Newly added services appear in your monthly usage report. At your annual adjustment, if the total cumulative usage of all services used in the prior 12 months exceeds your annual commitment amount, there will be a True Up / True Forward payment.

For term subscriptions, you have subscribed to a service for an agreed time. If you have concerns about your usage of existing services in your subscription, discuss these with your account team.

For Pay-as-you-go and FCP models, you are billed on what you consume. If you want to stop using a service, stop using it.

• Term Subscription: You will receive regular reports of your consumption, and your account team will review these reports with you on a quarterly basis. If there is excess usage, work with your channel partner to submit a one-time order for the excess usage. You also have the option to amend your subscription to increase your entitlement amount for the remainder of your subscription term.
• FCP: You will get regular consumption reports showing your consumption toward your annual commitment amount. If you have consumed over your annual commitment, work with your channel partner to submit a True Up / True Forward payment covering your excess consumption at your agreement anniversary.
• Pay-as-you-go: You will receive a monthly bill for what you consumed in the previous month.

If the products are on the same subscription, you will receive one bill. If the products are on separate subscriptions, you will receive one bill per subscription.

For most products, requests are the primary metering unit. A request is any single inbound transaction evaluated by a given security capability. It is counted once as it passes through the configured application delivery and security services.

Requests are pooled across services. If you have multiple services configured, the request is counted only once. For example, if you have Web Application Firewall (WAF), API Protection, and Rate Limiting configured, a request that passes through all of these is counted as a single request against your pool.

Customers on the Essentials package purchase Essentials requests, while Enterprise customers purchase Enterprise requests. Enterprise requests grant access to a wider range of services to provide enhanced protection for applications.

Services that count requests:

• Web App Firewall
• API Protection
• L7 DDoS
• Malicious User Detection
• Threat Campaigns
• Rate Limiting
• IP Reputation
• Geo Filtering
• IP Filtering
• ASN Filtering
• TLS FP Filtering
• HTTP Filtering
• Detection Control
• CDN

No. Routed DDoS requests that get blocked do not count against your pool of requests.

Rules can be:

• Routes
• Service policy rules
• CDN cache rules
• Rate limiting policies
• CORS policy
• Trusted client rules
• Client blocking rules

Rules are only counted when in use. If a rule is deployed as part of a shared service policy to multiple load balancers, the rule is counted for every load balancer it is applied to. If IP lists or IP sets are present in a rule, each IP match is counted as a unique rule. L3 policies (for example, Fast ACLs) are not counted as Application Rules.

An execution is one instance of one monitor endpoint operating from one region. If you have one HTTP monitor operating in three regions every five minutes, you have three executions occurring every five minutes.

An application is a deployed instance hosted on a web server, available through a defined entry URL. Different URLs are counted as different applications.

There are no limits to the number of scans you can conduct per month on those applications.

Client-Side Defense transactions refer to distinct page views of an authorized website with Client-Side Defense JavaScript. This number is generally lower than the total page views on those pages.

A transaction is any request that comes to the Bot Defense service. This includes requests from endpoints configured to be protected using Bot Defense, and requests for Bot Defense JavaScript as configured by the user.

Transaction counts are measured as a daily average over a month and are sold in 500K per day blocks, with tiered pricing available.

For Data Intelligence Basic, a transaction is defined as an API call made to a Device ID backend to fetch device identifiers. You can include Data Intelligence on all web pages, or just specific pages.

For Data Intelligence for Bot Defense, a transaction is defined as a call made to an endpoint protected by Bot Defense, which can include Login, Forgot Password, Payment, Address Change, and Create Account.

Customer Edge (CE) nodes, App Stack combo-nodes, and containers are metered by node hour. Node hours are based on the size and the hours the node is running. Size is typically determined by the hardware or virtual machine size. On public cloud providers, size is selected during CE provisioning.

CDN offers regional pricing for four distinct regions: North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, and requires a data transfer SKU for each region CDN will operate in. To estimate your total volume of traffic to cover with the data transfer SKUs, multiply the number of requests by the average size of those requests. CDN requests come from the same shared pool as other services.

Using CDN for web applications to enhance performance: In general, take the total data transfer amount and divide by 50 KB to determine the number of requests.

A typical website setup would need 16 TB of data transfer. Using 50 KB as the average request size, 16 TB supports 320 million requests spread across the regions that the website operates within.

Using CDN to support video traffic, including Video on Demand (VOD) and live video: In general, take the total data transfer amount and divide by 500 KB to determine the number of requests.

A typical setup for video traffic uses 1 PB of data transfer. Using 500 KB as the average request size, 1 PB of data transfer supports two billion requests.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services load balancers are cloud-managed, globally distributed load balancing functions that route application traffic across origins (apps, clusters, or sites) based on availability, health checks, and traffic policies. They can provide L4/L7 traffic management features such as TLS termination, routing, persistence, and integration with web application and API protection (WAAP) security controls at the edge or in customer environments. They are delivered through a SaaS-based control plane with data planes running on F5 global points of presence (PoPs) and Customer Edge (CE) nodes to balance and protect hybrid multicloud applications.

Load balancers distribute incoming application traffic across one or more backends (origins) to improve availability, performance, and resiliency. They continuously health-check origins and apply traffic policies (for example, routing, TLS handling, failover, and session behavior) to send requests to the best available destination. They can also help protect applications by enforcing security controls such as DDoS mitigation and web application/API protections at the edge or in customer environments.

Load balancers are used to:

• Provide highly available, resilient delivery of apps and APIs by distributing traffic across multiple origins and enabling health-check-based failover.
• Support hybrid multi-cloud application deployments by steering users to the closest or best-performing backend and simplifying traffic management across regions and providers.
• Improve security and operational control by centralizing L7 policies (TLS, routing, access controls) and integrating DDoS and WAAP protections in front of applications.

Public load balancers expose a publicly reachable VIP or endpoint (typically on the internet) to accept external client traffic and route it to one or more origins. Any internet-facing application needs a public load balancer.

Private load balancers expose an internal-only VIP or endpoint reachable only from private networks (for example, through VPC/VNet, VPN, or direct connect) for east-west or internal application access.

There are no limits to the number of private load balancers an F5 Distributed Cloud Services customer can deploy.

Public load balancers are limited by internet exposure and origin reachability: the VIP is publicly accessible and origins typically must be reachable from the public edge (or through approved tunnels and connectivity), which can increase security and compliance constraints.

Private load balancers are limited by network scope: the VIP is only reachable from connected private networks, so access requires VPN, Direct Connect, or interconnect and won't serve general internet clients without an additional public entry point.

In practice, public load balancers prioritize external accessibility but demand tighter protection and egress controls, while private load balancers reduce exposure but add dependency on private routing, DNS, and enterprise connectivity.

• Term Subscription: You are charged for public load balancers each month based on your purchase volume. You can add or remove public load balancers in conversation with your account team.
• FCP-B: You are charged for any public load balancers that you deploy and configure. Once they start passing traffic, they draw from your requests pool.

Enterprise load balancers can support MQTT, QUIC, MCP, and database protocols in addition to HTTP, TCP, and UDP. They also support a one-second DNS refresh rate on CEs, 15-second health check intervals, and improved traffic insights (for example, time-series anomaly detection, top talkers, and flow analysis).

Each item has an associated SKU that allows you to increase your usage limits. F5 will not cut off usage if you exceed your usage limits. If you do exceed your usage limits, the following will happen depending on your subscription type:

• Term Subscription: Your account team will contact you in the quarter in which you started a new service to review the additional costs. Work with your partner and account team to add and co-term the services to your subscription.
• Pay-as-you-go: Billed monthly in arrears for all usage.
• Flex Consumption Program (FCP): Newly added services appear in your monthly usage report. At your annual adjustment, if the total cumulative usage of all services used in the prior 12 months exceeds your annual commitment amount, there will be a True Up / True Forward payment.

No. Each customer is tied to a package. If you want to move from the Essentials package to the Enterprise package, contact your account team.

In addition to the capabilities in the Essentials package, the following services are included with the Enterprise package:

Note: Items marked with an asterisk (*) are new or changed from the Essentials package.

Each item has an associated SKU that allows you to increase your usage limits. F5 will not cut off usage if you exceed your usage limits. If you do exceed your usage limits, the following will happen depending on your subscription type:

• Term Subscription: Your account team will contact you in the quarter in which you started a new service to review the additional costs. Work with your partner and account team to add and co-term the services to your subscription.
• Pay-as-you-go: Billed monthly in arrears for all usage.
• Flex Consumption Program (FCP): Newly added services appear in your monthly usage report. At your annual adjustment, if the total cumulative usage of all services used in the prior 12 months exceeds your annual commitment amount, there will be a True Up / True Forward payment.

Yes, you can downgrade from the Enterprise package to the Essentials package, but you will lose access to specific features that are only available on the Enterprise package.