Billing method | Description | Precautions |
Subscription | You must pay the subscription fee when you create an instance. If you pay a subscription fee for 10 months for subscription instances that are billed on a monthly basis, you are not charged a subscription fee for the subsequent two more months.
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Pay-as-you-go | The billing cycle is 1 hour. If you use an instance for less than 1 hour, you are billed for 1 hour. If you change the memory capacity of your instance within a billing cycle, you are billed based on the highest memory capacity of your instance during the cycle. For example, if the memory capacity of your instance is 1 GB at 01:10, and you increase the memory capacity to 8 GB at 01:20 and decrease it to 2 GB at 01:50, you are charged for the instance based on the highest memory capacity 8 GB during the billing cycle between 01:00 and 02:00. In most cases, the system generates a bill in 1 to 3 hours after a billing cycle ends. The actual point in time when your bill is generated may vary. For example, in most cases, the system generates the bill before 11:00 for a billing cycle between 09:00 and 10:00. After a bill is generated, fees are automatically deducted from your account balance.
| You can release your instance at any time. After you release your instance, you are no longer charged for the instance. You can purchase a maximum of 10 pay-as-you-go instances using an Alibaba Cloud account that can pass real-name authentication. These instances include ApsaraDB for Memcache instances and ApsaraDB for Redis instances. You can change the billing method from pay-as-you-go to subscription. After the billing method is changed, the instance is immediately billed on a subscription basis. For more information, see Switch to the subscription billing method.
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