Billing methods - Pricing| Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

ApsaraDB supports the following two billing methods.

Billing method	Description	Remarks
Prepayment (Subscription)	If you select prepayment, you must make the payment when creating an instance. If you purchase a subscription instance with a 1-year service period, you can enjoy a 15%-off discount.	During the contract period, the instance can only be upgraded, but cannot be downgraded or released. Subscription instances cannot be converted to Pay-As-You-Go instances.
Pay-As-You-Go	The billing cycle is one hour. If you use an instance for less than one hour, you will be charged for the full hour. If you change the instance capacity within one billing cycle, the billed amount will be calculated based on the largest capacity used during the cycle. For example, if your instance capacity is 1 GB at 1:10 a.m. and changed to 8 GB at 1:20 a.m. and later to 2 GB at 1:50 a.m., then the instance will be billed for the 8-GB capacity during the billing cycle between 1:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. The bill is generally provided within one hour (not later than 3 hours) after the current billing cycle. The specific time may vary depending on the system billing time. For example, the bill for the billing cycle from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. is generally provided before 11:00 a.m. After a bill is generated, the fee will be automatically deducted from your account balance.	The instance can be released at any time, and no fee will be charged after release. Pay-As-You-Go instances cannot be converted to Subscription instances. Every real-name authenticated Alibaba Cloud account can activate a maximum of 10 Pay-As-You-Go instances (including ApsaraDB for Memcache and ApsaraDB for Redis instances). If you need more instances or want to purchase instances with larger capacity, you can open a ticket.

Note:

ApsaraDB for Redis is billed for the capacity you activate, rather than the capacity you actually use.

For example, if you activate a 2 GB ApsaraDB for Redis instance and the instance stores 256-MB data, fees are charged based on the 2 GB capacity.

The intranet traffic generated by ApsaraDB for Redis instances is free of charge. That is, the data transmitted between ECS and ApsaraDB for Redis is free of charge.