Dear Alibaba Cloud customer,

To improve transparency in transaction rules and cost calculations for resource upgrades and downgrades, Alibaba Cloud will implement new pricing rules for public cloud subscription products (annual and monthly) starting at 10:00 AM (Beijing Time) on December 31, 2025. These rules will be rolled out to users through a phased, invitation-only pilot program.

Details of change

• Voucher refund update: For products purchased using voucher deductions, the system now supports partial voucher refunds during the downgrade process.
• Transparent cost breakdown: We’ve made our billing clearer. You can now see the exact calculation steps and fund composition for any configuration changes in your order history.
• The calculation of upgrade fees remains consistent with the original rules: Upgrade fee = (New configuration official website catalog price × Remaining duration of the new order - Original configuration official website catalog price × Remaining duration of the original order) × Discount (multiple billing items will be calculated separately, then summed).
• Downgrade refund amount calculation adjustment:
  • Original downgrade refund amount calculation formula: Downgrade refund amount = Online refund amount × Price difference ratio between old and new configurations.
  • New downgrade refund amount calculation formula: Downgrade refund amount = Remaining cost of the original specification - Cost of purchasing the new specification (multiple billing items will be calculated separately, then summed), where:
    • Remaining cost of the original specification = Actual payment amount of the order - Consumed amount; where the consumed amount = Daily unit price × Used duration × Discount applicable to the used duration.
    • Cost of purchasing the new specification = Number of months purchased × Monthly price of the new specification.

Example:

An Internet customer purchases an annual or monthly ECS subscription (assuming product pricing information: Original price $ 5,000 per month, 20% discount for a 1-year purchase, 10% discount for a 6-month purchase). The customer purchased for one year, using a $ 8,000 voucher, and paid $ 40,000 in cash (i.e., original price 5,000 per month × 12 × discount 0.8 - voucher 8,000). After using the service for six months (eligible for a 10% discount), the customer initiates a downgrade (downgrade specification pricing information: $ 3,000 per month, no promotional discounts for the downgrade specification): The cost calculation is as follows:

Downgrade price difference = Remaining cost of the original specification - Cost of purchasing the new specification.

Where:

Remaining cost of the original specification = Actual payment amount of the order - Consumed amount; Consumed amount = Daily unit price × Used duration × Discount applicable to the used duration.

Actual payment amount of the order = $ 48,000 (including a $ 8,000 voucher).

Daily rate = $ 5000 per month × 12 / 365 = $ 164.38 per day

Used duration = 183 days (less than one day is counted as one day)

Discount applicable to used duration = 0.9

Thus

Amount consumed = $ 164.38 per day × 183 days × 0.9 = $ 27073.39

Remaining cost of original specification = $ 48,000 - $ 27,073.39 = $ 20,926.61

Cost of purchasing new specification = Number of months purchased × Monthly price of new specification

Where:

Number of months purchased = (365 - 183) / 30 = 6.07 months, thus, cost of purchasing new specification = $ 6.07 × 3,000 per month = $ 18,210

Total refund amount = $ 27,073.39 - $ 18,210 = $ 8,863.39

Refunded cash = 8,863.39 × (40,000 / 48,000) = $ 7,386.16

Refunded voucher amount = $ 8,863.39 × (8,000 / 48,000) = $ 1,477.23

Note: The original order's refundable value of $ 48,000 comprises $ 40,000 in cash and $ 8,000 in vouchers, thus the refund amount is returned in the same proportion of cash and vouchers.

Note

• If you used a voucher when purchasing Cloud Products and find that the downgrade order confirmation page still shows no voucher refund available after December 31, 2025, at 10:00 AM, it's possible that you have not yet been invited to the beta test. Please feel free to contact us or your service manager. Thank you for your continued trust and support.
• The new version of the specification change rule currently only applies to products with a single-node architecture (such as RDS Basic Edition). If you purchased a product with a multi-node architecture (for example, purchasing RDS Cluster Edition with three nodes in a single purchase), this rule is not yet supported. Products involved in this scenario:
  • Tair (Redis OSS-compatible)
  • E-MapReduce
  • DNS
  • ApsaraDB RDS
  • NAT Gateway
  • AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL
  • ApsaraDB for MongoDB
  • Express Connect
  • Microservices Engine
  • Anti-DDoS
  • Realtime Compute for Apache Flink
  • Elasticsearch
  • ApsaraDB for OceanBase
  • Edge Node Service (ENS)
  • PolarDB
  • Drive and Photo Service
  • Internet Shared Bandwidth
  • Hologres
  • Cloud Connector (CC)
  • ApsaraDB for ClickHouse
  • Cloud Firewall
  • Cloud Web Hosting (CWH)
  • ApsaraMQ for Kafka
  • IPv6 Gateway
  • Security Center
  • Alibaba Mail