Billing - Elastic IP Address - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

EIP supports two billing methods: pay-as-you-go and subscription.

Billing methods

The internet fees for an EIP are billed according to its own rules, regardless of the associated resource.

Billing method	Pay-as-you-go		Subscription
Billing method	Pay-as-you-go (pay-by-data-transfer)	Pay-as-you-go (pay-by-bandwidth)	Subscription (pay-by-bandwidth)
Billable item	Data transfer fee Learn when CDT is used for billing by default. You are charged for the total outbound data transfer from the EIP. Inbound data transfer is free of charge. EIP configuration fee (public IP retention fee) Learn when the EIP configuration fee (public IP retention fee) is waived.	Bandwidth fee EIP configuration fee (public IP retention fee) Learn when the EIP configuration fee (public IP retention fee) is waived.	Bandwidth fee
Billing cycle and bill generation time	The billing cycle is one hour. If you use an EIP for less than one hour, you are billed for a full hour. A bill is typically generated within one hour after the current billing cycle ends. The actual bill generation time may vary.	The billing cycle is one day. Bills are settled on a daily basis. A bill is typically generated in the early morning of the next day. The actual bill generation time may vary.	Billing cycle: The subscription period for your order, which is based on the UTC+8 time zone. The cycle starts at the exact time of activation or renewal and ends at 24:00:00 on the expiration date. A bill is typically generated on the first day of the calendar month after the billing cycle ends. The actual bill generation time may vary.
Scenarios	Workloads with fluctuating traffic peaks, such as gaming or video streaming applications. Temporary or bursty resource usage. Choose the pay-by-data-transfer method if you cannot estimate your data transfer usage.	Workloads with stable traffic peaks. Temporary or bursty resource usage.	Predictable resource usage period. Workloads with stable traffic peaks. Long-term resource usage. This option is more cost-effective than pay-as-you-go (pay-by-bandwidth).
Cost optimization	Upgrade to CDT to get free data transfer quotas and tiered cumulative pricing. Add the EIP to a shared bandwidth. Purchase a Data Transfer Plan to offset data transfer costs.	Add the EIP to a shared bandwidth.	-

Before the bill is generated, the unsettled charges for the current month are displayed in your account. Unsettled charges may cause discrepancies when you request invoices. To avoid this, request invoices after bills are settled.

Pricing

For the prices of EIP billable items, see the following topics:

For actual prices, see the buy page in the console.

Bills and usage

Log on to the Expenses and Costs console to view your billing details.
To view bills for this product, go to the billing details page in the Expenses and Costs console. Select EIP from the product filter and specify a time range to view detailed EIP bills. Enter the EIP ID in the Instance ID filter to locate the billing records for that instance.
To view usage, go to the EIP console. In the Monitor column, click the icon next to an EIP to view its real-time bandwidth and data transfer. For more detailed monitoring data, use Cloud Monitor.
Invoices and taxes: You can request an invoice after you pay for an order or after a bill is settled. For more information, see get an invoice.

Switching billing methods

To learn about the procedures and effects of switching billing methods, see Subscription - Switch billing method and Pay-as-you-go - Switch billing method.