ECS snapshots can be billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. Snapshots start to incur charges after they are created.

Pay-as-you-go

When the pay-as-you-go billing method is used, snapshots are billed based on the size of the storage space occupied by the snapshots. The snapshots are billed every hour. A storage duration of less than an hour is calculated as an hour.

  • Snapshot size. Unit: GiB.

    The snapshot size is defined as the difference between the amount of storage space occupied by the current snapshot and that occupied by the last snapshot. You have a free storage quota of 5 GiB each month. The first snapshot created for a disk is a full snapshot. Subsequent snapshots are incremental snapshots. The size of a single incremental snapshot is smaller than the disk size. For more information, see Incremental snapshots.

  • Snapshot unit price. Unit: USD/GiB/month. You can obtain the price per hour after conversion.
    For more information about the list of snapshot prices by Alibaba Cloud region, see the Pricing tab on the Elastic Compute Service page. Scroll down to the Snapshot Fee section to view the price list based on the region. You can also click Download price to download the list of snapshot prices by Alibaba Cloud region in CSV or JSON format.View the list of snapshot prices

Example of pay-as-you-go snapshot billing

Note The following example is only for reference. You can view your actual snapshot bills in the Billing Management console.

For example, assume that you have three disks in the China (Hangzhou) region under your account. You created a snapshot for each disk at 10:20. The snapshots are 50 GiB, 220 GiB, and 40 GiB in size.

  • Billing conditions
    • Snapshot size: 50 GiB + 220 GiB + 40 GiB = 310 GiB.
    • Snapshot unit price: Assume that the pay-as-you-go price for snapshots in the China (Hangzhou) region is USD 0.0200/GiB/month, which is equivalent to USD 0.0000277778/GiB/hour.
  • Billing calculation

    The period from 10:20 to 11:00 is calculated as an hour. After the free storage quota of 5 GiB per month is deducted, you need to pay the following snapshot fee: (310 - 5) GiB × USD 0.0000277778/GiB/hour = USD 0.008472.

    • The actual payable amount shown on the billing page is USD 0.008.
    • The historical bill records the amount as USD 0.0085.

Overdue payments

If your payment account balance in the current billing cycle is less than the payable amount of the previous billing cycle, the system sends an SMS or email notification. The snapshot service is suspended 24 hours after the bill becomes overdue. The following section describes the situations when the bill becomes overdue:

  • In the first 15 days, all existing snapshots are retained, but no snapshots can be created. All automatic snapshots whose retention period is less than 15 days are deleted.
  • After 15 days, all snapshots are deleted, except for those that have been used to create disks or custom images. The automatic snapshot policy is also deleted.

References