permegabyte

Permegabyte, often written as per MB or per-megabyte, is a pricing unit used to charge for data-related services by the amount of data involved. It is commonly encountered in telecommunications, cloud storage, and content delivery networks, where costs are assessed based on how many megabytes of data are transferred, stored, or processed. The term may appear as a synonym for per MB, though “per megabyte” is the more standard form.

In practice, per-megabyte pricing is applied in different ways. Data transfer pricing charges for the total megabytes moved to or from a service during a billing period. Storage pricing charges for the number of megabytes stored per unit of time. Units are sometimes decimal (1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes) and sometimes binary (1 MiB = 1,048,576 bytes); many providers use decimal MB for billing but report usage in MiB or MB, leading to potential confusion.

Billing typically involves rounding rules, minimum charges, and sometimes free data quotas. Some plans use tiered pricing, where the price per MB decreases as usage increases, while others maintain a fixed rate regardless of volume. Per-MB pricing can offer straightforward, scalable costs for small transactions but may be less intuitive when comparing plans that use different unit definitions or include ancillary fees.

Overall, per megabyte provides a simple, linear way to model costs tied to data volume, but users should verify the exact unit definitions, what data is counted (egress, ingress, or storage), and any rounding or minimums that affect the final bill.