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Billing

Xinference uses per-second, postpaid billing based on the GPU instances running your deployments. There are no upfront commitments or minimum charges.

How Billing Works

  1. A deployment starts — the billing clock starts when cluster provisioning begins.
  2. GPU instances run — each instance type has a per-second rate.
  3. A deployment terminates — billing stops when the cluster is fully torn down (status: terminated).

You are billed for wall-clock time, not for the number of inference requests made. A deployment sitting idle still incurs charges.

Billing Accounts

Every organization has a Billing Account that aggregates usage across all members' deployments. Individual users (without an organization) have a personal billing account.

Billing accounts operate in postpaid mode by default. Usage is tallied and invoiced at the end of each billing period.

Metering

Usage is measured as GPU instance-seconds — the product of the number of instances and the duration they run, broken down by instance type.

Example: - 1× g5.xlarge (A10G, 24 GB GPU) running for 1 hour = 3,600 instance-seconds

Each instance type has a separate per-second rate. See Price Plans →.

Viewing Usage

Dashboard

Navigate to Billing to see: - Current period usage summary - Per-deployment usage breakdown - Historical invoices

API

Authentication uses the session cookie set when you sign in (see Authentication).

import requests

r = requests.get(
    "https://api.xinference.co/v1/billing/usage-summary",
    cookies={"session": "<your-session-cookie>"},
)
print(r.json())

Cost Control Tips

  • Terminate idle deployments — the 15-minute idle auto-termination is a safety net, not a substitute for explicit termination.
  • Use quantized models — int4 models run on smaller (cheaper) instances than full-precision equivalents.
  • Monitor usage — set up billing alerts in Billing → Alerts to get notified when usage exceeds a threshold.
  • Choose the right model size — a 7B model is much cheaper per hour than a 70B model and sufficient for many tasks.

Next Steps