This topic provides an overview of the billing information for ALB.
Billing methods
Application Load Balancer (ALB) supports two billing methods: pay-as-you-go (post payment) and resource plan (subscription).
Pay-as-you-go (post Payment): You are charged based on the actual usage of each billable item. You pay after you use the service. This billing method is suitable for scenarios where your business volume frequently changes.
Resource Plan (subscription): You purchase a resource plan in advance. When fees are settled, the usage is deducted from the resource plan first. You purchase the resource plan before the usage is deducted. This billing method is suitable for scenarios where your business volume is relatively stable.
Compared with the pay-as-you-go billing method, resource plans are more cost-effective.
If your usage exceeds the quota of your resource plan, the excess usage is automatically charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. This generates a post-payment bill. Purchase a resource plan that meets your business requirements.
Details of billable items
The following figure shows the billable items of a pay-as-you-go ALB instance: 
Billing cycle
The instance fee and Load Balancer Capacity Unit (LCU) fee of ALB are calculated on an hourly basis and charged based on the actual usage. In most cases, bills are generated within an hour after a billing cycle ends. The time when bills are generated is determined by the system.
You are charged for the Internet traffic of a public ALB instance. A public ALB instance uses an Elastic IP Address (EIP) to provide Internet access. The Internet traffic fee of an EIP that is associated with an ALB instance is charged to the EIP. Therefore, the billing cycle, payment deduction, and bill generation time of Internet traffic fees are the same as those of pay-as-you-go EIPs. For more information, see Billing cycle.
Pricing
For information about the prices of ALB in the product catalog, see ALB billing rules and ALB resource plans. For the actual purchase price, see the purchase page.
You can use the ALB LCU calculator to estimate LCU consumption.
More information
Overdue payments
Causes of overdue payments
You have not purchased resource plans and your account balance is insufficient.
You have purchased resource plans, but the resource plans cannot offset all fees.
Overdue payment description
Status | Resource status | Operation |
Top-up notifications | The system checks whether your account balance is sufficient to pay for the next three billing cycles based on the average payable amount during the last 7 hours. If your Alibaba Cloud account balance is insufficient, the system will send you a notification by text message or email. Warning You are notified if your service is about to be suspended due to an overdue payment. To ensure service continuity, renew your service at the earliest opportunity. | Top up your Alibaba Cloud account. Your instance immediately returns to normal. |
Overdue | If your Alibaba Cloud account has an overdue payment, all pay-as-you-go instances that belong to the account become overdue.
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Fifteen days after an ALB instance is stopped due to an overdue payment, the ALB instance is released. The configurations and data of the instance are deleted and cannot be recovered. | You cannot restore your pay-as-you-go instances. |
View overdue payment amount
Log on to the Billing Management console.
On the Account Overview page, view the overdue payment amount.
View usage details
Log on to Billing Management.
In the left navigation bar, select .
On the Bill Details page, click the Usage Details tab, select Product as Server Load Balancer, configure the Billing Item, Usage Time, and Granularity for the Server Load Balancer usage that you want to view, and then click Export CSV.
For Billing Item, you can select a Server Load Balancer sub-product. In this example, Application Load Balancer is selected to export the usage details of ALB.
On the Export Records page, when the Status changes from Generating to Exported, click Download in the Actions column to download the usage details file to your computer.
After you open the CSV file, you can view the usage details about Load Balancer Capacity Units (LCUs) by start time, end time, or instance ID.
Query bills and consumption details
Log on to the Bill Details page in Billing Management.
On the Bill Details page, you can click the Bill Flow, Bill Details, and Usage Details tabs to view the consumption and bill information. For more information, see Bill flow, Bill details, and Usage details.