Unsubscriptions and refunds apply only to subscription products, such as subscription instances and resource plans. If you want to stop a service, Alibaba Cloud revokes the resource and refunds the corresponding payment based on the unsubscription rules. Pay-as-you-go products do not involve refunds. To stop billing for pay-as-you-go products, you can release or delete the resource in the Alibaba Cloud Management Console by following the instructions for the specific billable item.
Unsubscribe Guidelines
Product unsubscription on Alibaba Cloud covers the following main scenarios: unsubscribing from resources in use, unsubscribing from unactivated renewal cycles, automatic unsubscription due to a resource creation or change failure, refunds for resource downgrades, refunds for converting from subscription to pay-as-you-go, and refunds for physical goods.
Resource retention after unsubscription
To prevent data loss from accidental operations, a subscription instance enters the Expired After Refund state after a refund is processed. Its resources are retained for a period of time. If you unsubscribe by mistake, go to the ECS console as soon as possible to manually renew the instance before its resources are released.
The following periods are the maximum retention times. The actual release time may be earlier. We recommend that you back up or migrate your data before unsubscribing. After an unsubscribed ECS instance is renewed and recovered, issues such as data loss or changes to the static public IP address may still occur.
vCPUs, memory, and static public IP addresses are released within 24 hours after the refund.
Disks are released within 15 days after the refund.
If you disable the release disk with instance, the disk will be detached and retained when the instance is released.