Billable items and billing methods

MaxCompute charges for each project based on its storage, compute, and download usage. This topic describes the cost breakdown, billable items, billing methods, and how to choose the right plan for your needs.

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: For jobs such as SQL, MapReduce, Spark, and Mars, you pay for resources before use. Pay-as-you-go: You are billed for jobs such as SQL, MapReduce, Spark, and Mars after they are used.
Download pricing (pay-as-you-go)	MaxCompute charges based on the amount of data downloaded over the internet or across regions. No fees are charged for importing data into MaxCompute.
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 for 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, you typically consume fewer resources. Purchasing reserved computing resources can lead to idle capacity, which makes the pay-as-you-go method more cost-effective.

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.