Billing

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 the other editions are commercial editions. The pricing of the editions varies with each other. 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 three commercial editions enhance performance, provide better support for large-scale clusters, and simplify the use of ASM instances in production environments. You are charged different mesh management fees for different editions of ASM instances. For more information, see Billing of mesh management.
Alibaba Cloud services: You are charged for other Alibaba Cloud services that are used when you use ASM instances. For more information, see Billing of related Alibaba Cloud services.

Billing of mesh management

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 Instance types.


Edition	Maximum scale supported	Unit price	Remarks
Standard Edition	50 pods Note We recommend that you do not use this edition in production environments.	Free of charge	We recommend that you do not use this edition in production environments.
Enterprise Edition	1,000 pods	USD 0.98 per hour-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 commitments for this edition become unavailable. We recommend that you update the ASM instance to an advanced edition.
Ultimate Edition	10,000 pods	USD 4.63 per hour-ASM instance

Billing of related Alibaba Cloud services

The following table describes the billing of other Alibaba Cloud services related to ASM.


Alibaba Cloud service	Required	Description	Billing description
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 What is an EIP?.	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?.	Billing of Alibaba Cloud Prometheus Service
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?.	Overview

Billing method

ASM supports only the pay-as-you-go billing method. The CLB service on which ASM depends supports both the subscription and pay-as-you-go billing methods.

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 starts 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 starts 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 from 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 bill details

Log on to the ASM console.
In the top navigation bar, choose Expenses > User Center.

Note If you log on to the console by using your Alibaba Cloud account, you can choose Expenses > Bills in the top navigation bar.
In the left-side navigation pane, choose Bill > Bill Details.
View bill details.
- View the bill list, including each subscription order and each pay-as-you-go bill.
  On the Consumption by Bill tab of the Bill Details page, set the Billing Cycle, Account/Owner Account, and Order/Bill No. parameters as needed and click Search. Then, view the list of bills that are queried.
- View the detailed information of your bills, such as the billable items, unit prices, usage, and amounts that are offset by resource plans.
  On the Bill Details page, click the Billing Details tab. On this tab, set the Billing Cycle, Resource Group, Instance Name/Instance ID, Statistic Item, and Statistic Period parameters as needed and click Search. Then, view the detailed bill information such as the billable items, unit prices, and usage.
Optional:Export the bill list or bill details.
The following section describes how to export the bill details.
- Customize columns to be displayed.
  On the Bill Details page, click the Billing Details tab. On this tab, click Customize Column Options. In the dialog box that appears, select the columns to be displayed, and then click OK.
- Export the bill details to a CSV file.
  On the Bill Details page, click the Billing Details tab. On this tab, click Export Billing Overview (CSV). In the dialog box that appears, select Current List or All Content as Exported Content, enter the captcha in the Captcha field, and then click OK. After the bill details are exported, click Download to download the CSV file.