Abstract: A method for determining a price for a usage based service session such as an on-line network service or telephone service has general steps of dividing a potential usage period into a plurality of tiers, and assigning an incremental charge and a usage rate to the tier. Usage charges for each tier can be determined by multiplying the usage rate for the tier by the amount of usage in the tier. A total price for the session can then be calculated by totaling the incremental charges for each tier entered during the session with the usage charges for each tier. Tier usage rates and incremental charges may comprise zero or negative numbers to provide flexibility in pricing a usage session.

Abstract: A method for converting usage data into Extensive Markup Language, wherein the usage data includes a plurality of categories having at least one parameter assigned to each category. The method includes the steps of generating all possible combinations including a parameter from each category, defining an identifier tag for uniquely identifying each generated combination, defining a table tag for representing an associated data of each identifier tag, and saving all tags to an Extensive Markup Language file.

Abstract: A method for archiving data using an archiver connected to a data collector having a list of available data sets of an Internet Usage Manager within a predetermined time interval, which includes the steps of obtaining a list of available data sets from the data collector, reading data for a data set from the list, associating read data to the data set, converting all the read data to a predefined archive format once data from each available data set in the list is read, saving the converted data to a file, and waiting for a predetermined time to repeat the foregoing steps.