Interesting point of view - it's certainly always a bit hard to find the right verbage that everyone can understand, but hopefully this discussion clarified things!
Last time I used a traditional hosting provider, I could get a new bare metal server setup in under half an hour. I would hardly call them "pay what you use" even though I could start and stop servers and change the plan I'm on and still be only two to three times slower than doing the same on AWS.
Certainly - I've been seeing a bunch of usage based pricing that price on a different metric (like metrics per second) etc.
Regardless, with Timescale Cloud, if you get a machine, you pay the price for that machine for as long as you use it. So I guess to avoid the confusion, we can call this just paying for the machine :)
By the way, I've recently started using TimescaleDB (past month or two) for processing cryptocurrency trading information and I'm liking it a lot so far. I love that I can use Postgres as normal, but have efficient time-based queries.
My first ever test query was to generate minutely OHLC+volume from time,price,quantity trades. It was pleasantly easy to do:
select time_bucket('1 minutes', time) as minutely,
max(price) as high,
min(price) as low,
first(price, time) as open,
last(price, time) as close,
sum(quantity) as volume
from trades
group by minutely
order by minutely;