Billing FAQs

Distributed Cloud customers will receive a monthly report from F5 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 will 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

Most purchased products have a monthly usage entitlement included in the purchase (for example, 1 application per month, 1M good requests per month). Additional capacity can be purchased to accommodate increased monthly usage.

Your obligations for excess usage or going over your consumption entitlements 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.

Most of the services can be enabled directly through your console by going to the “catalog” on the homepage. Some services may require you to work with F5 Support to enable, and you can work with your account team to help coordinate the services enablement.

Billing for usage of added services will vary by buying program. You can always work with your partner and account team to understand the additional cost of adding a service.

• Term Subscription: You will be contacted by your account team in the quarter in which you have started a new service to review the additional costs. Work with your partner and account team to add and co-term the service(s) to your subscription.

• Pay-as-you-go: Billed monthly in arrears for all usage.

• Flex Consumption Program (FCP): Newly added services will 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 regarding 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, you can just stop using it.

If you are currently purchasing under a 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, you will need to work with your channel partner to submit a one-time order for the excess usage. You will also have the option to amend your subscription to increase your entitlement amount for the remainder of your subscription term.

If you are currently purchasing under FCP, you will get regular consumption reports showing your consumption towards your annual commitment amount. If you have consumed over your annual commitment, you will need to work with your channel partner to submit a True Up or True Forward payment covering your excess consumption at your agreement anniversary.

If you are currently purchasing under a Pay-as-you-go program, you will receive a monthly bill on what you have consumed in the previous month period.

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

The base package offers capabilities that equip you with the essential application delivery and security services needed for your website or publicly accessible applications. A list of all products included in the base package can be found in this data sheet F5 Distributed Cloud Services Base Package.

A good request for API Protection is any request that is not blocked. If a request is forwarded on to the application or API origin servers, it is a good request.

Each request applies to the meter of each service. For example, if a request passes through WAF and API Protection, it would be counted by the meter for each service.

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 apps.

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 good request for Rate Limiting is any request that is not blocked. If a request is forwarded on to the application or API origin servers, it is a good request.

A transaction is any request that comes to the Bot Defense service. This includes (1 requests from endpoints configured to be protected using Bot Defense and 2) the 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. Data Intelligence can be included 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.

Nodes, 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 both the Data Transfer SKU and the HTTP(s) Requests 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.

Utilizing CDN for Web Applications to enhance performance: In general, take the total data transfer amount and divide by 50kb to determine the number of requests.

A typical website setup would need 16 TB of Data Transfer. Using 50kb 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 which includes Video on Demand (VOD) and Live Video: In general, take the total data transfer amount and then divide by 500kb to provide number of requests.

A typical setup for Video Traffic uses 1PB of Data Transfer. Using 500kb as the average request size, 1 PB of Data Transfer supports 2 billion requests.