The snapshot service provided by Alibaba Cloud ECS supports the Pay-As-You-Go billing method.

Pay-As-You-Go

The snapshot fee is charged based on the size of the storage space used by a snapshot and the storage duration. Alibaba Cloud charges the snapshot fee as follows:

Charge of a snapshot = Snapshot size × Storage duration × Unit price

  • Snapshot size: the billing item of the snapshot service. The unit is GiB.

    The snapshot size can be defined as the storage used by the current snapshot subtracted by the storage used by the previous snapshot. Alibaba Cloud can identify disk space in which no data has been written and mark it as an empty block to save your snapshot space. You can use 5 GiB storage space free of charge each month. Therefore, the size of a single incremental snapshot is less than the size of the corresponding disk. For more information, see Snapshot concepts.

  • Storage duration

    The number of hours from the time at which a snapshot is created to the time that the snapshot is deleted. The unit is hour. Similar to other Pay-As-You-Go resources, Alibaba Cloud updates the billing data and charges for Pay-As-You-Go snapshots on an hourly basis. The minimum chargeable storage duration is one hour. That is, periods of time that are less than an hour are billed as an hour.

  • Unit price
    The unit price of Pay-As-You-Go snapshots is consistent with the unit price of OSS standard storage. The unit price is given in the following unit: USD/GiB/month. For a comprehensive price list of various Alibaba Cloud regions, see the Pricing tab page of the ECS product details page. In the Snapshot Fee area, you can view the price list of a specific region. You can also click Download price to download a price list in the CSV or JSON format.
    View snapshot price list

Example of Pay-As-You-Go billing

The example is based on the following three assumptions:
  • You have three cloud disks in your China (Hangzhou) account.
  • You created a snapshot for each cloud disk at 10:20. This is the first time you create snapshots for the cloud disks.
  • The snapshot size is 50 GiB, 220 GiB, and 40 GiB, respectively.

Based on the preceding assumptions, the snapshots are billed as follows during the time period from 10:20 to 11:00:

  • Snapshot size: 50 GiB + 220 GiB + 40 GiB = 310 GiB
  • Storage duration: The storage duration is less than an hour and is billed as an hour.
  • Unit price: Assume that the unit price is 0.0200 USD/GiB/month for China (Hangzhou), which is equal to 0.0000277778 USD/GiB/hour.

The snapshot fee is calculated as follows (the 5 GiB free storage space is subtracted): (310 – 5) GiB × 0.0000277778 USD/GiB/hour × 1 hour = 0.008472 USD

The snapshot fee is 0.008 USD on the payment page and 0.0085 USD on the bills page.

Overdue payment

If you have an overdue payment, the snapshot service is suspended 24 hours later.

Within the first 15 days, all your snapshots are retained but you cannot create snapshots. Automatic snapshots with a retention duration shorter than 15 days will be deleted after they expire.

Fifteen days after the overdue payment, only snapshots that were used to create disks or custom images are retained.

Note The system sends you a reminder via a short message or an email in advance if your account balance is less than the bill for the previous billing cycle.

References