Billable items and billing methods

MaxCompute charges for each project based on storage, computing, and download operations. This topic describes the billable items, billing methods, and fee composition of MaxCompute, and explains how to select a billing method.

The following table describes the billable items and billing methods of MaxCompute.

Billing method	Description
Storage pricing (pay-as-you-go)	Storage fees: Charged based on the amount of data stored in MaxCompute using a tiered pricing model. Backup storage fees: By default, MaxCompute provides an automatic backup feature with a one-day data retention period for free. If a project administrator sets the data retention period to more than one day, MaxCompute charges for the backup data retained beyond the first day on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Compute pricing (pay-as-you-go)	MaxCompute supports pay-as-you-go and subscription billing methods. The two billing methods are independent of each other. After you activate and purchase a computing resource, you must associate it with a project before you can use it. Subscription: Charges for SQL, MapReduce, Spark, and Mars jobs. You must pay before you use the resources. Pay-as-you-go: Charges for SQL, MapReduce, Spark, and Mars jobs on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Download pricing (pay-as-you-go)	For data downloaded over the Internet or across regions, MaxCompute charges based on the amount of data downloaded. Note Data import into MaxCompute is free of charge.
Compute billing (pay-as-you-go)	The pay-per-hour billing method for MaxCompute provides elastic reserved resources on top of a basic subscription plan. You can scale computing resources in or out on an hourly basis as needed. You are charged for the scaled-out resources based on the resource amount and usage duration. This is a pay-after-you-use method. After a successful scale-out, the resources are reserved until a successful scale-in. Elastic reserved computing resources are used for tasks such as SQL, MapReduce, and Spark jobs.
Storage disaster recovery pricing (Pay-as-you-go)	MaxCompute storage fees include storage billing and backup storage billing. After you enable zone-disaster recovery for storage, the storage fees for the project are calculated based on the storage disaster recovery billing rules. The billing method for backup storage remains unchanged.

Fee composition

The following figure shows the billable items of MaxCompute.

Billing method selection

If you are a new user, we recommend that you start with the pay-as-you-go billing method. When you first start using MaxCompute, resource consumption is typically low. The pay-as-you-go method is more cost-effective in this scenario, as purchasing reserved CUs could lead to idle resources.

Data transfer fee description

Internet download fees
Data downloaded from an Internet Endpoint is charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. For more information about Internet Endpoints, see Endpoint.
Shared resource group
- Each project has a limit on the number of free concurrent data transmissions. If this limit is exceeded, an error is reported. For more information about the concurrency limit, see Limits on free Data Transmission Service resources.
- MaxCompute does not guarantee the available capacity of this shared pool or the throughput that you can achieve.
- The shared resource group for Data Transmission Service does not support a queuing policy. If resources are insufficient, an error is returned.

Note

Dedicated resource groups are currently available in the China (Hangzhou), China (Shanghai), China (Beijing), and China (Shenzhen) regions.