After you purchase a subscription WAF instance, the burstable pay-as-you-go QPS feature is enabled by default to prevent the actual business QPS from exceeding the purchased specification. This feature bills the excess on a pay-as-you-go basis, effectively handling short-term or sudden traffic spikes during scenarios such as major promotions.
Starting from 00:00:00 on May 28, 2026, WAF will gradually adjust the burstable pay-as-you-go feature. After the adjustment, both new and existing users of WAF 3.0 subscription edition will have the burstable pay-as-you-go QPS capability enabled by default, and manual disabling or QPS specification adjustments will not be supported. For more information, see Adjustments to WAF billing features.
Billing
When the actual peak QPS of your business exceeds the purchased QPS (the sum of the QPS included in your subscription WAF edition and QPS extension), the excess is processed and settled by the burstable pay-as-you-go QPS feature. This feature is enabled by default when you purchase WAF and cannot be disabled.
Billable item Request processing fee for QPS exceeding the purchased QPS. The unit prices are as follows:
The fees for basic elastic QPS, excluding bot management and API security, are as follows:
The Chinese mainland: CNY 0.15 /QPS/day.
Outside the Chinese mainland: CNY 0.20 /QPS/day.
Additional fees apply for the following features:
Legacy API Security: CNY 0.10 /QPS/day.
Bot management: CNY 0.10 /QPS/day.
New API Security Premium: CNY 0.12 /QPS/day.
Billing cycle Fees are settled daily (UTC+8). A new billing cycle starts after settlement.
Formula Total fee = (Daily peak QPS - QPS included in your edition - QPS extension) x Request processing fee unit price.
Maximum guaranteed capacity level
WAF instances in the Chinese mainland: 100,000 QPS
WAF instances outside the Chinese mainland: 50,000 QPS
Billing examples
The following example uses the pricing for WAF in the Chinese mainland. Assume you have purchased a subscription WAF 3.0 Ultimate edition instance (including 10,000 QPS) and a QPS extension of 50,000 QPS. If bot management is currently enabled and the daily peak traffic reaches 64,000 QPS, the excess over the purchased QPS is 4,000 QPS (calculated as: 64,000 - 10,000 - 50,000).
In this scenario, because bot management is enabled, the request processing fee unit price for burstable QPS is CNY 0.25/QPS/day. Therefore, the total fee for that day is CNY 1,000 (4,000 x 0.25).
View burstable QPS bills
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Log on to the Web Application Firewall 3.0 console. From the top menu bar, select the resource group and region (Chinese Mainland or Outside Chinese Mainland) for the WAF instance.
In the left-side navigation pane, choose .
In the bill list, view the daily Type of Burstable QPS, Unit Price for Burstable QPS, Service Traffic, Capacity Limit, and total fee of the instance.