Pay-as-you-go - Instance| Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

Overview

You are billed for pay-as-you-go resources on an hourly basis. If you have a quota agreement with Alibaba Cloud, fees are deducted only when the cumulative consumption of your account exceeds the quota. You must complete the payment at least once a month.

You can change the configurations of your pay-as-you-go resources. For more information, see Change the instance type of a pay-as-you-go instance and Modify the bandwidth configurations of pay-as-you-go instances.

You can change the billing methods of your pay-as-you-go resources. For more information, see Change the billing method of an ECS instance from pay-as-you-go to subscription.

You can use one of the following methods to view the consumption details of your pay-as-you-go ECS resources:

For information about how fees are calculated, see the Billing section of this topic.
For information about how the resource state affects the billing duration, see Billing duration section of this topic.

Note If you stop an instance but do not release its resources, you continue to be charged for these resources.
For information about settlement, see the Settlement cycle section of this topic.

Applicable resources

The pay-as-you-go billing method is applicable to the following ECS resources:

Computing resources (vCPUs and memory)
Image
Cloud disks
Public bandwidth (pay-by-bandwidth)
Snapshots

The combination of computing resources (vCPUs and memory), Elastic Block Storage (EBS) devices, an image, and a network type uniquely determines the service form of an ECS instance. When you create a pay-as-you-go instance, the image and disks created along with the instance use the pay-as-you-go billing method. However, you can also use a billing method for network usage.

Note After you create a pay-as-you-go instance, you can attach pay-as-you-go disks that are separately created to the instance. For more information, see Attach a data disk.

After you create a snapshot, you are immediately charged for the snapshot.

You can view the total price of the preceding resources in the lower part of the instance buy page in the ECS console.

Total indicates the total price of the following resources:
- Computing resources (vCPUs and memory)
- Cloud disks
- Public bandwidth (pay-by-bandwidth)
  
  Note If you select pay-by-traffic as the billing method for network usage, the total price does not include the price of public bandwidth. For more information, see Public bandwidth.
Marketplace Image Fees: If you selected a paid Alibaba Cloud Marketplace image, Marketplace Image Fees are displayed.

Billing

You are charged for pay-as-you-go resources based on their billing cycles. The billing cycle of a pay-as-you-go resource immediately begins after the resource is created. You can calculate the total fee that you must pay for a period of time based on the configurations of your choice. The following table describes the billing cycle of each ECS resource and the formula used to calculate the fee of each resource.


Resource	Billing cycle	Formula	Unit price
Computing resources (vCPUs and memory)	Varies based on the number of the vCPUs of the instance type. 1 vCPU: 10 minutes, with a minimum of 10 minutes 2 vCPUs: 5 minutes, with a minimum of 5 minutes 4 vCPUs: 2 minutes, with a minimum of 2 minutes More than 4 vCPUs: 1 second	Unit price of an instance type × Billing duration	For more information, see the Instance tab on the ECS Pricing page. Note Local disks are tied to specific instance types. The prices of local disks are included in the prices of corresponding instance types.
Image	1 second	Unit price of an image × Billing duration	You can view the price on the instance buy page in the ECS console or in Alibaba Cloud Marketplace.
Cloud disk (system disk)	Varies based on the number of the vCPUs of the instance type. 1 vCPU: 10 minutes, with a minimum of 10 minutes 2 vCPUs: 5 minutes, with a minimum of 5 minutes 4 vCPUs: 2 minutes, with a minimum of 2 minutes More than 4 vCPUs: 1 second	Unit price of a cloud disk × Disk capacity × Billing duration	For more information, see the Storage tab on the ECS Pricing page. Note The prices for pay-as-you-go disks are displayed on the page in the unit of USD per 100 GiB-hour. You can divide the unit price by 100 to obtain the unit price per GiB.
Cloud disk (data disk)	1 second	Unit price of a cloud disk × Disk capacity × Billing duration	For more information, see the Storage tab on the ECS Pricing page. Note The prices for pay-as-you-go disks are displayed on the page in the unit of USD per 100 GiB-hour. You can divide the unit price by 100 to obtain the unit price per GiB.
Public bandwidth (pay-by-bandwidth)	1 second	Unit price of bandwidth × Bandwidth value × Billing duration For more information, see Public bandwidth.	A tiered billing model is used for bandwidth. You can select a bandwidth value on the instance buy page to view the fee schedule.
Snapshot	1 hour, with a minimum of 1 hour	Unit price of a snapshot × Snapshot capacity × Billing duration For more information, see Snapshots.	For more information, see the Snapshot tab on the ECS Pricing page.

Note If the billing cycle is 1 second, you are charged for resources in 1-second increments. If an hourly price is displayed, you can divide the price by 3600 to obtain the price per second.

For example, you created a pay-as-you-go instance in the China (Qingdao) region and used this instance from 11:00:00 to 12:00:00 on August 8, 2019. The following figure shows the process of calculating the instance price.

Note The prices in the following figure are for reference only. For more information about actual prices, visit the URLs in the preceding table.

Billing duration

If a pay-as-you-go instance is automatically stopped due to overdue payments, the billing of some resources suspends. The billing resumes after you complete the overdue payment and reactivate the instance.

The following table describes the billing duration of each resource type on the premise that you have no overdue payments within your account.


Resource	Billing duration
Computing resources (vCPUs and memory)	The billing duration of computing resources (vCPUs and memory) is affected by the network type of the instance. For an instance of the classic network type, billing begins when the instance is created and ends when the instance is released. For an instance of the virtual private cloud (VPC) type, the billing duration varies based on whether the economical mode is enabled. If the economical mode is disabled, billing begins when the instance is created and ends when the instance is released. If the economical mode is enabled, billing begins when the instance is created and suspends when the instance is stopped in the ECS console. Billing resumes when the instance is started again in the ECS console and ends when the instance is released. For more information, see Economical mode. Notice If you stop the instance by shutting down its operating system, the economical mode cannot be not triggered. You can purchase reserved instances to minimize costs. For more information, see Overview.
Image	Billing begins when the instance is created and ends when the instance is released.
Cloud disk (system disk)	Billing begins when the instance is created and ends when the system disk is released along with the instance.
Cloud disk (data disk)	Billing begins when the data disk is created and ends when the data disk is released.
Public bandwidth (pay-by-bandwidth)	Billing begins when public bandwidth (pay-by-bandwidth) is enabled and ends when public bandwidth is disabled or when the instance is released. For information about how to disable public bandwidth, see Modify the bandwidth configurations of pay-as-you-go instances.
Snapshots	Billing begins when the snapshot is created and ends when the snapshot is deleted.

Note If a pay-as-you-go instance incurs charges of less than USD 0.01 during its entire lifecycle, you are charged USD 0.01.

To prevent unexpected charges incurred when a pay-as-you-go instance is not released in a timely manner, we recommend that you enable the automatic release feature. If automatic release is enabled, billing ends when the instance is released. The automatic release time is accurate to the second.

Settlement cycle

You are billed for pay-as-you-go ECS resources on an hourly basis. The fees for pay-as-you-go resources are paid together with those for other pay-as-you-go resources within your account. If you have a quota agreement with Alibaba Cloud, fees are deducted only when the cumulative consumption of your account exceeds the quota. If the cumulative monthly consumption of your account is less than the quota, fees are deducted on the first day of the next month.

If your default payment method is bank card, the quota is USD 1,000.
If your default payment method is PayPal or Paytm (India), the quota varies based on your ECS usage.

The system attempts to deduct fees three times: on the due date (T), day T+7, and day T+14. If the fees of a pay-as-you-go instance cannot be deducted on the due date (T), payment becomes overdue for the instance and the system attempts to deduct the fees again on day T+7 and day T+14. If all three attempts to deduct the fees fail, the instance is stopped on day T+15 and its billing also stops. For more information, see the "Pay-as-you-go resources" section in Pay-as-you-go resources

Overdue payments

When you have overdue payments within your account, pay-as-you-go resources cannot be used. Your pay-as-you-go instances may be stopped and the resources may be released. To prevent the consequences of overdue payments, such as instance stop or release from affecting your business, add funds to your account to complete the overdue payments at your earliest convenience. For information about changes in resource states when payments become overdue, see Overdue payments.