This topic describes how you are billed for Elastic Compute Service (ECS) images and provides examples on how to calculate image fees.
Billing overview
You may be charged for ECS images. The following table describes the billing rules for different types of images.
Image type | Billing rule |
Public images | Public images, including open-source and commercial public images, are provided by Alibaba Cloud at different prices:
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Custom images | Custom images are created from instances or snapshots or imported from your computer. Billing for custom images consists of two parts:
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Shared images | Shared images are shared with you by other Alibaba Cloud accounts. If you use a shared image that is derived from a paid image, you are charged a license fee for the shared image. For example, if you share Image A (paid image) with User B and User B uses Image A to create instances, User B is charged a license fee for Image A. |
Alibaba Cloud Marketplace Images | Alibaba Cloud Marketplace images are provided by independent software vendors (ISVs). Their prices are displayed on the image product pages in Alibaba Cloud Marketplace. |
Community images | Community images are custom images shared by users with the Alibaba Cloud community. If a community image is derived from a paid image, you are charged a license fee when you use the community image to create ECS instances. |
Billing methods
You must select an image when you create an ECS instance. The image has the same billing method and billing duration as the instance. The following table describes the billing methods.
Billing method | Billing rule |
Subscription: You must pay for an image before you can use it. | ![]()
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Pay-as-you-go: You can use resources and pay for them afterwards. Fees are automatically deducted from the balance of your Alibaba Cloud account. | ![]()
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Images can be used only with ECS instances. Reserved Windows instances include public images at no additional cost and can offset public image charges.
Billing examples
The following table provides examples on how to calculate image fees. Assume that you purchase an instance with 2 vCPUs in the China (Hangzhou) region and that the instances uses a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 64-bit image.
The prices in the following table are only for reference. The actual prices on the Pricing tab of the Elastic Compute Service product page shall prevail.
Billing method | Billing item | Fee (USD) |
Subscription |
| Price = Unit price of the image × Subscription duration = 43.00 × 1 = 43.00 |
Pay-as-you-go |
| Price = Unit price of the image × Billing duration = 0.063 × (24 × 30) = 45.36 |
References
For more information about image billing, see FAQ about image fees.