Service Mesh (ASM) charges an hourly mesh management fee based on your instance edition (Enterprise Edition or Ultimate Edition), plus the cost of related Alibaba Cloud services used in your deployment.
Billable items
ASM billing consists of two parts:
Mesh management fee: A pay-as-you-go hourly charge that varies by edition. See Mesh management pricing.
Related Alibaba Cloud services: Separate charges for infrastructure services such as CLB, VPC, and monitoring. See Related service costs.
Mesh management pricing
ASM uses pay-as-you-go billing for mesh management. The fee is calculated as:
Instance fee = Unit price (per edition) x Usage duration (hours)| Edition | Pod limit | Unit price | Estimated monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise Edition | 1,000 pods | USD 0.98/hour per instance | ~USD 706/month |
| Ultimate Edition | 10,000 pods | USD 4.63/hour per instance | ~USD 3,334/month |
The estimated monthly cost assumes 24/7 usage over 30 days. Actual prices are subject to the buy page.
Both editions include SLA commitments. For details, see Service Mesh Service Level Agreement.
If the pod count exceeds the edition limit, the SLA no longer covers instance performance. Upgrade to a higher edition to restore SLA coverage.
ASM counts pods from namespaces detected through service discovery and automatically excludes the following system namespaces: istio-system, arms-prom, kube-node-lease, kube-public, and kube-system.
For feature differences between editions, see Functions and features.
Related service costs
ASM integrates with the following Alibaba Cloud services. Each service is billed separately.
| Service | Required | Purpose | Billing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Classic Load Balancer (CLB) | Yes | Access to the Istio control plane and API server. Learn more | Pay-as-you-go |
| Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) | Yes | Network environment and routing rules for ASM instances. Learn more | VPC billing |
| Network Load Balancer (NLB) | No, recommended | ASM gateway creation (v1.18 and later). Learn more | NLB billing |
| Elastic IP Address (EIP) | No, recommended | Internet access to the API server. Learn more | EIP billing |
| Managed Service for Prometheus | No, recommended | Monitoring and alerting for ASM instances. Learn more | Pay-as-you-go |
| Simple Log Service | No, recommended | Access log collection from ASM gateways and sidecar proxies. Learn more | SLS billing |
Billing cycle and bills
ASM bills each commercial-edition instance in 1-hour cycles and generates a bill within 10 to 30 minutes after each cycle ends. The amount is automatically deducted from your account balance.
Mid-cycle upgrade: If you upgrade an instance during a billing cycle, the entire cycle is billed at the higher edition rate.
Example: Upgrading from Enterprise Edition to Ultimate Edition at 10:15 bills the full 10:00--11:00 cycle at the Ultimate Edition rate (USD 4.63/hour).
New instance: Billing starts from the first full hour after creation.
Example: Creating an Enterprise Edition instance at 10:20 bills the first cycle from 11:00 to 12:00. The bill is generated between 12:10 and 12:30.
Overdue payments
An overdue balance disrupts both the control plane and data plane. Pay outstanding bills promptly to avoid service loss.
When your account balance is insufficient:
Access to the Istio control plane and the API server of added clusters is blocked immediately.
Services running on the data plane are affected.
If the bill remains unpaid for 15 days, Alibaba Cloud stops ASM service and removes the instance from the console. The instance is not released, but removed instances cannot be recovered.
View billing details
To review ASM charges, go to the Bill Details page and click the Billing Details tab. Select different statistical dimensions or time periods to view detailed reports. For more information, see Billing details.