Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh (ASM) provides the following editions that support different features and capabilities: Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition.Standard Edition is a free edition, and Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition are commercial editions. The billing methods vary depending on the edition. This topic describes the billable items and billing methods of ASM instances.

Billable items

  • Mesh management:Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition extend the features of Standard Edition to enhance multi-protocol support and dynamic extension capabilities, provide fine-grained service governance, and improve the zero-trust security system. In addition, the commercial editions enhance performance, provide better support for large-scale clusters, and simplify the use of ASM instances in production environments. The mesh management fee varies with your edition of ASM instances. For more information, see Billing of mesh management (pay-as-you-go).
  • Alibaba Cloud services: You are charged for Alibaba Cloud services that are used together with ASM instances. For more information, see Billing of related Alibaba Cloud services.

Billing of mesh management (pay-as-you-go)

ASM instance fee = Unit price for a specific instance edition × Usage duration (hours)

The following table describes the unit prices for different editions of ASM instances.

Note
  • For more information about the features supported by different editions of ASM instances, see Functions and features.
  • The prices provided in this topic are for reference only. The actual prices are subject to the buy page.
Edition Maximum number of supported pods Unit price Remarks
Standard Edition 50 Pod
Note We recommend that you do not use this edition in production environments.
Free We recommend that you do not use this edition in production environments.
Enterprise Edition 1,000 Pod USD 0.98 per hour per ASM instance
  • Service level agreement (SLA) commitments are provided. For more information, see Service Mesh Service Level Agreement.
  • For more information about the pricing of other Alibaba Cloud services that are used, see the documentation of the corresponding Alibaba Cloud services.
  • If the number of pods managed by an ASM instance of this edition exceeds the maximum number, the SLA of this edition cannot guarantee the performance of the instance. We recommend that you update the ASM instance to a more advanced edition.
Ultimate Edition 10,000 Pod USD 4.63 per hour per ASM instance

Billing of related Alibaba Cloud services

The following table describes the billing of other Alibaba Cloud services that you create when you use ASM.

Alibaba Cloud service Required Description Billing rules
Classic Load Balancer (CLB) Yes This service is used to access the Istio control plane and API server. For more information, see SLB overview.

Pay-as-you-go
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Yes This service is used to build a network environment and create routing rules for ASM instances. For more information, see What is a VPC?. Billing
Elastic IP Address (EIP) No, but recommended This service is used to expose the API server to the Internet. For more information, see EIP overview. Billing overview
Prometheus Service No, but recommended This service is used to monitor ASM instances and generate alerts when exceptions are detected. For more information, see What is Prometheus Service?. Pay-as-you-go
Log Service No, but recommended This service is used to collect access logs of ingress gateways in ASM instances. For more information, see What is Log Service?. Billing overview

Billing rules

Bill generation

The billing cycle of an ASM instance of a commercial edition is 1 hour. Alibaba Cloud calculates the fee for using the instance and generates a bill on an hourly basis. A bill is generated within 10 to 30 minutes after the current billing cycle ends. After a bill is generated, Alibaba Cloud automatically deducts the amount of the bill from the balance of your Alibaba Cloud account if your account balance is sufficient. If you update an ASM instance to an advanced edition during a billing cycle, the instance is billed for this billing cycle based on the pricing of the advanced edition. Examples:
  • If you update an ASM instance from Enterprise Edition to Ultimate Edition at 10:15:00, the instance is billed for the billing cycle that lasts from 10:00:00 to 11:00:00 based on the pricing of Ultimate Edition.
  • If you create an ASM instance of a commercial edition during 10:00:00 to 11:00:00 (excluding 11:00:00), the instance is billed for the billing cycle that lasts from 11:00:00 to 12:00:00. The bill for this billing cycle is generated between 12:10:00 and 12:30:00.

Overdue payment and instance release

If your Alibaba Cloud account does not have a sufficient balance for paying an ASM instance of a commercial edition, the payment for the ASM instance becomes overdue. In this case, you cannot access the Istio control plane or the API server of the clusters that are added to the ASM instance. In addition, services that run on the clusters on the data plane are affected. If you do not pay the overdue bill within 15 days after the overdue date, Alibaba Cloud stops providing the ASM service for you and removes the ASM instance from the console. However, Alibaba Cloud does not release the ASM instance. The ASM instance cannot be recovered after it is removed.

View billing and usage details

  1. Log on to the ASM console.
  2. In the top navigation bar, choose Expenses > User Center.
  3. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Spending Summary > Spending Summary.
  4. On the Bills page, view billing and usage details.
    You can view billing and usage details on the Overview, Bills, and Details tabs.
    Tab name Description
    Overview On the Overview tab, you can set Billing Cycle and Account, and then view the total cost and service-specific cost summary under the account during the billing cycle.
    Bills On the Bills tab, you can set Billing Cycle, Account/Owner Account, and Order/Bill No. based on your requirements, click Search, and then view the billing information that is filtered out.
    Details On the Details tab, you can set Billing Cycle, Statistic Item, and Statistic Period to filter usage details, and then click Search to view the details.
  5. Optional:Export bills.
    On the Bills page, you can click the Overview, Bills, or Details tab, customize columns that you want to display, and export bills in a CSV file. This topic describes how to export bills on the Details tab.
    1. On the Details tab, click Customize Column Options. In the dialog box that appears, select the items that you want to display, and click OK.
    2. On the Details tab, click Export Billing Overview (CSV). In the dialog box that appears, select Current List or All Items as Exported Content, enter the verification code, and then click OK.
    3. After the CSV file is exported, click Download.