This topic describes the billable items, billing methods, unit prices, billing cycle, and bill generation time of Object Storage Service (OSS).
Billable items
The billable items of OSS are classified into the following types:
Basic billable items: Fees that most users incur when using OSS, including storage fees for data storage, traffic fees for downloading objects from OSS buckets or delivering objects by using Alibaba Cloud CDN, and API operation calling fees for read and write requests.
Billable items for value-added features: Fees incurred by a minority of users who enable and use value-added features. To improve data processing efficiency or enhance user experience, the value-added features, such as image processing (IMG), transfer acceleration, and DDoS protection, are provided. For more information, see Billable items for value-added features.
Billable items
The following figure shows the billable items of OSS.
Billing methods
OSS supports the following billing methods:
Pay-as-you-go: By default, the pay-as-you-go billing method applies to all billable items. You are charged based on the actual usage of each billable item after you use resources. This billing method is ideal for scenarios in which resource usage fluctuates.
Subscription (resource plans): OSS provides resource plans to offset fees of specific billable items, such as storage and traffic fees. You can purchase resource plans that cover specific billable items at favorable prices. Resources are consumed before fees are offset by resource plans. If the resource plans are exhausted, you are charged for excess resource usage on a pay-as-you-go basis. This billing method is suitable for scenarios in which resource usage is stable.
Unit prices
For more information about OSS pricing, see OSS pricing.
Billing cycle
OSS calculates all resource usage by hour and charges you based on your actual usage.
Storage fees are calculated in USD per GB-month, as indicated on the OSS pricing page. When you use the pay-as-you-go billing method, storage fees are calculated based on the following formula: Storage fees = Actual storage usage (GB) × Unit price per hour. Therefore, when you calculate storage fees charged based on actual storage usage, you must convert GB-month to GB-hour based on the following formula: Unit price in USD per GB-hour = Unit price in USD per GB-month/30/24. For example, the unit price for the storage usage of Standard locally redundant storage (LRS) objects is USD 0.0173 per GB-month, and the unit price in GB-hour is USD 0.000024 per GB-hour (0.0173/30/24).
Bill generation time
Bills are generally generated within 1 hour after a billing cycle ends. The time when bills are generated is determined by the system. For example, you are billed at 09:30:00 for the fees that are generated from 08:00:00 to 09:00:00 of the same day.
The bill that you receive at 09:30:00 may include only the fees that are generated from 07:00:00 to 08:00:00 because of system latency.