ACK Edge cluster fees consist of management fees and the fees of the cloud services that a cluster uses. Understand how each fee is calculated, when charges apply, and what happens if your account becomes overdue so that you can plan and control your edge computing costs.
Billing items
The following table lists the fees that apply to each cluster type.
Cluster type | Cluster management fee | Node management fee | Cloud resource fees |
ACK Edge Pro cluster |
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ACK Edge Basic cluster |
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Overdue payments
If your account balance is insufficient to pay a bill, your ACK Edge cluster enters the overdue state. You can no longer access the cluster API server, but the workloads on the nodes continue to run.
If the account remains overdue for more than 15 days, Alibaba Cloud suspends the service, removes the corresponding nodes from the cluster without releasing them, and deletes the ACK Edge cluster and the container instances in the cluster. The container instances that are released because the ACK Edge cluster is deleted cannot be restored.
Refund policy
The pay-as-you-go billing method does not involve refunds.
Billing cycle
The billing cycle of ACK Edge fees is 24 hours. Alibaba Cloud meters the service usage of the previous calendar day and generates a bill on the next calendar day, and then deducts the billed amount from your Alibaba Cloud account. A bill is usually generated within 8 to 10 hours after the current billing cycle ends.
View bills
For the detailed procedure to view bills, see View bills.
Billing FAQ
Why does my daily bill amount suddenly increase or decrease?
If you scale out or scale in nodes, the system adjusts the fees based on the total number of vCPUs of the nodes that the cluster manages, and the new fees are reflected in the bill of the next day.
If you remove a node without using the Container Service console, such as by running
kubectl delete node, the removed node may still be billed on the day of the removal. Therefore, remove nodes in the Container Service console.
I deleted an ACK Edge cluster. Why do I still receive a bill and get charged today?
The management fees of an ACK Edge cluster are billed in cycles from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 each day and charged on the next day. If you deleted an ACK Edge cluster yesterday, the billing system already recorded the fees of yesterday. Therefore, a bill is generated and the fees are charged today. No bill is generated on the following day.
How do I stop the billing of an ACK Edge cluster?
Delete the ACK Edge clusters in all regions. Before you delete a cluster, back up your applications and data.
Are the nodes in the NotReady state billed?
An ACK Edge cluster manages nodes whose state is Ready or NotReady. Therefore, the nodes in the NotReady state are still billed. You must remove nodes in the Container Service console to stop the billing of these nodes.