If you select the pay-as-you-go billing method for your cluster, you do not need to pay upfront when you create the cluster. You are billed based on your actual usage of compute and storage resources. If you do not use compute plans or storage plans, you are billed on an hourly basis for the compute and storage resources that you use. Fees are deducted from your account on an hourly basis.
Scenarios
If your business workloads are small, infrequently change, and have small fluctuations, we recommend that you purchase a pay-as-you-go cluster. Fees are deducted from your account based on the actual usage of the compute nodes.
Combination with storage plans
The storage space of a PolarDB cluster automatically scales based on the amount of stored data. You do not need to specify the storage capacity. You are charged for your actual storage usage. To reduce the costs of storing a large amount of data, we recommend that you purchase a PolarDB storage plan.
You are charged based on data volume and retention period. If you want to store a large amount of data such as 1,000 GB or more, we recommend that you use this billing method together with storage plans. Larger discounts are offered by storage plans with larger capacities.
Storage plans can be applied to all PolarDB clusters in the regions that are specified by the Resource Plan Type parameter. You can select Chinese Mainland or Outside Chinese Mainland for the parameter.
If the storage plan capacity is insufficient, you can purchase a new storage plan or upgrade the storage plan. For information about how to upgrade a storage plan, see the "Upgrade a storage plan" section of the Renew or upgrade a storage plan topic. You cannot downgrade a storage plan after you purchase it.
If the amount of used storage exceeds the capacity of your storage plan, you are charged for excess storage usage on a pay-as-you-go basis.
For example, you created three PolarDB clusters that each have 400 GB of storage. If you purchase a storage plan that has 1,000 GB of capacity and the clusters share the storage plan, the excess 200 GB of storage usage is charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. For more information, see View the database storage usage.
Purchase a pay-as-you-go cluster
For information about how to purchase a pay-as-you-go cluster, see Purchase a pay-as-you-go cluster.
If you want to change the billing method of a cluster from subscription to pay-as-you-go, see Change the billing method of a cluster from subscription to pay-as-you-go.
For information about how to purchase storage plans, see Purchase a storage plan.