# Flat Rate Billing ## What it is Flat Rate is the simplest meter: you select a **bandwidth cap in Mbps** and pay a fixed monthly price for it. There is no per-GB line, no 95th-percentile calculation, and no package. One EIP, one cap, one flat line on the invoice. It is the right choice when throughput is steady and heavy — a video origin, a transcoding worker, a replication pipeline that runs continuously. You're paying for the pipe, and you don't want the cost to track the shape of your traffic. *** ## How it works When you create an EIP with Flat Rate billing, you select a bandwidth cap in Mbps. That cap is both what you pay for and the maximum throughput your EIP can push. If you select 100 Mbps, you pay for 100 Mbps for the month — even if your daily average is 10. Traffic is clamped at the cap; there is no bursting above it. Sizes are set in **Mbps** on the console. The practical minimum is 1 Mbps. *** ## Direction asymmetry The cap can be sized independently for ingress and egress — for example, a media-serving EIP might set 1 Gbps egress and only 10 Mbps ingress. The console usually surfaces a single symmetric value; the API lets you split them. *** ## When this is the right choice * **High, continuous utilization.** If your EIP is near its peak most of the time, Flat Rate's fixed price beats any per-byte or 95th plan. * **Predictable cost.** The invoice line does not move with traffic shape — useful when the bill has to be forecasted. * **Single workload, single EIP.** No aggregation benefit to chase, nothing to share. ## When to reach for something else * **Mostly idle, bursty peaks.** You pay for the cap even when you're not using it — [Data Transfer](/welcome/elastic-compute/networking/01-overview/03-data-transfer.md) will be cheaper. * **Many EIPs with peaks that don't line up.** The sum of per-EIP caps is almost always higher than one [Aggregated Burstable 95th](/welcome/elastic-compute/networking/01-overview/05-aggregated-95th.md) commitment that covers all of them. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.console.zenlayer.com/welcome/elastic-compute/networking/01-overview/04-flat-rate.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.