You can create a pay-as-you-go project to run your short-term or temporary business and a subscription project to run your long-term or stable business. If your business changes, MaxCompute allows you to change the billing method of your project to reduce costs. You can switch between the subscription and pay-as-you-go billing methods for a project. A quota is a unit that can be used to manage computing resources in MaxCompute. The billing method of the default quota for a project is the same as the billing method of the project. If you want to change the billing method of a project, you can change the billing method of the default quota for the project. This topic describes how to switch between billing methods for a project.
Prerequisites
Both pay-as-you-go and subscription resources of MaxCompute are purchased.
Description
The differences between subscription and pay-as-you-go billing methods are only in the billing and running modes of computing resources. The billing methods for storage and download resources are the same.
The computing jobs in a subscription project can use only the purchased subscription computing resources. Subscription computing resources are exclusive resources, and pay-as-you-go resources are shared resources. Computing resources are compute unit (CU) resources.
The following table describes the scenarios in which you can switch billing methods.
Scenario | Description | Effective period |
Switch the billing method from pay-as-you-go to subscription | Supported You must purchase CUs of MaxCompute before you can switch the billing method. You cannot switch the billing method for a project across regions. To purchase subscription MaxCompute computing resources, click the link to go to the MaxCompute (Subscription) page. | The new billing method takes effect immediately. However, if a job is running, the new billing method does not take effect until the next time you run the job. |
Switch the billing method from subscription to pay-as-you-go | Supported. The fees that you already paid are not refunded. However, you can still create projects to use the purchased CUs. After you purchase MaxCompute CUs, you can create multiple projects to share the CUs. |
We recommend that you do not frequently switch billing methods because this may affect the running time of your computing jobs.
You need to only specify computing quotas for specific jobs in your project. For more information, see Specify a quota group at the job level.
Procedure in the MaxCompute console
The billing method of the default quota for a project is the same as the billing method of the project. To change the billing method of the default quota for a project, perform the following steps:
Before you change the billing method of the default quota for a project, make sure that you have purchased computing resources of the billing method. To purchase computing resources, click the link to go to the buy page of MaxCompute.
In the new MaxCompute console, you must separately configure the
Default Quotaparameter for each project on the Parameter Configuration page.
Log on to the MaxCompute console. In the top navigation bar, select a region.
In the left-side navigation pane, click Projects.
On the Projects page, find the project for which you want to switch the billing method and click Manage in the Actions column.
On the Parameter Configuration tab, click Edit in the Basic Information section.
Select a quota from the Default Quota drop-down list.
References
After you purchase subscription computing resources, you can configure quota groups on the Quotas page of the MaxCompute console. This way, you can plan and make full use of computing resources. For more information, see Manage quotas in the new MaxCompute console.
For more information about the use cases of resource planning, see Best practices for planning and configuring elastically reserved CUs.