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Billing and accounting in Waldur

Waldur's accounting and billing components are responsible for collecting accounting data and presenting it to end users. It features built-in reporting and accounting functionality, enabling the tracking of usage information for each project and its resources. During the service offering creation process, providers can define accounting components (such as CPU-h, GPU-h, and storage for HPC; CPU, RAM, and storage for VMs) and set the pricing plans for each component. Consumers can view usage information according to the policies established by the provider.

From a provider point of view, Waldur supports invoice generation and exposes enough of information via APIs to integrate with custom payment providers.

Waldur offers convenient tools for consumers to view resource usage information. The user interface displays overall usage data within a project and breaks down monthly usage across resource components such as CPU, GPU, and storage. End users can export this usage data in PDF, CSV, and XLSX formats. Access to information varies by user role: project members can see details for their specific projects, while organization owners can view information for all projects within their organization.

Billing models

Waldur supports three billing models for resource components, configurable per offering:

  • Monthly (Limit-based): Resources are billed each month based on reserved limits. This is the default for OpenStack Tenant offerings. Limits can be changed at any time, with billing adjusted on the current invoice.

  • Prepaid (One-time + Pre-paid): Resources are billed upfront for the full subscription period. The charge is calculated as price × limit × months. An end date is required. Mid-period limit changes create supplementary charges for the remaining period.

  • Usage-based: Resources are billed on polled consumption, for example core-hours and GB-hours for OpenStack tenants. Quotas cap usage and are not billed.

Both models can coexist on the same offering — for example, CPU cores can be prepaid while a management fee remains monthly. Custom components (e.g., consultancy hours) can use the "Maximum total" limit period for flat one-time charges.

A plan can also override how the offering's built-in components are billed through its billing mode (inherit, limit-based or usage-based), so one OpenStack offering can carry a reserved plan and a pay-as-you-go plan side by side. Prepaid is not among the plan modes: it says when a limit-based subscription is paid rather than how consumption is counted, so it stays on the components and is set there. Customers switch between them with a plan change: the limit fee is charged for the plan's current billing period (whole month for monthly plans, per day for daily plans) and usage accrues from the switch. See Offering a limit-based and a usage-based plan side by side.

For configuration details, see Configuring billing model per component.

In addition to that, Waldur offers convenient way for exporting the usage information for visualization with Grafana.