2.29 Pricing Unit

The Pricing Unit represents a provider-specified measurement unit for determining unit prices, indicating how the provider rates measured usage and purchase quantities after applying pricing rules like block pricing. Common examples include the number of hours for compute appliance runtime (e.g. Hours), gigabyte-hours for a storage appliance (e.g., GB-Hours), or an accumulated count of requests for a network appliance or API service (e.g., 1000 Requests). Pricing Unit complements the Pricing Quantity metric. Distinct from the Consumed Unit, it focuses on pricing and cost, not resource and service consumption, often at a coarser granularity.

The PricingUnit column MUST be present in the billing data. This column MUST be of type String. It MUST NOT be null when ChargeClass is not "Correction" and ChargeCategory is "Usage" or "Purchase", MUST be null when ChargeCategory is "Tax", and MAY be null for all other combinations of ChargeClass and ChargeCategory. Units of measure used in PricingUnit SHOULD adhere to the values and format requirements specified in the UnitFormat attribute.

The PricingUnit value MUST be semantically equal to the corresponding pricing measurement unit value provided in:

• The provider-published price list
• The invoice, when the invoice includes a pricing measurement unit

Provider-specified measurement unit for determining unit prices, indicating how the provider rates measured usage and purchase quantities after applying pricing rules like block pricing.