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Object Storage Service:Pay-as-you-go

Last Updated:Mar 20, 2026

Pay-as-you-go is the default billing method for OSS. You pay for what you use. Fees are calculated based on actual resource consumption and deducted from your Alibaba Cloud account balance after each billing cycle ends.

Your total OSS bill depends on three factors:

  • What you store — the volume of data in your buckets

  • How you access it — API calls, traffic, and data processing operations

  • Which features you enable — transfer acceleration, DDoS protection, and other optional capabilities

When to use pay-as-you-go

Pay-as-you-go works best when:

  • Your resource usage fluctuates and is hard to predict

  • Your workload is short-term or experimental

Billable items

ItemDescription
Storage feesCharged based on the volume of data stored in your buckets
Traffic feesCharged for data transferred in and out of OSS
API operation calling feesCharged per API call to OSS
Data processing feesCharged for data processing operations
Object tagging feesCharged based on the number of tags applied to objects
Transfer acceleration feesCharged when transfer acceleration is enabled on a bucket
Temporary storage feesCharged for storage occupied by incomplete multipart uploads
OSS DDoS protection feesCharged when OSS DDoS protection is enabled
Data indexing feesCharged for data lake acceleration index storage and queries
RTC traffic feesCharged for real-time communication traffic

Billing cycle

Bills are generated hourly and settled monthly.

Note

If the total value of your account balance and vouchers falls below the amount due, OSS notifies you by text message or email.

Pricing

For current pay-as-you-go unit prices, see the OSS Pricing page.