Expenses and Costs:Understand unexpected charges

Possible cause: You may have pay-as-you-go resources running in your account. These resources might be in a region that you do not use often or might have been purchased by another user who shares the account.

Troubleshooting

Possible cause: The subscription resource you purchased may be associated with pay-as-you-go components or services. Common scenarios include the following:

• When you use a subscription ECS instance, if you configure a static public IP address that is billed on a pay-by-data-transfer basis, you are billed hourly based on actual traffic. For more information, see Public bandwidth billing.

• A subscription ECS instance has a pay-as-you-go disk attached. For more information, see Elastic Block Storage billing.

• You created snapshots for an ECS instance. Snapshots are pay-as-you-go by default. For more information, see Snapshot billing.

• To ensure data security, data backup is enabled by default for RDS instances and cannot be disabled. If the backup size is within the free quota, backups are free of charge. If the backup size exceeds the free quota, you are charged for the excess usage. For more information, see Backup storage costs.

Troubleshooting

Possible cause: First, confirm that the resource was actually released. Shutting down or stopping a resource does not always stop billing. If charges are still generated after you delete a resource instance, this may be for one of two reasons:

• Associated resources were not released

  • You may have released only the primary instance, such as an ECS instance, but not its associated pay-as-you-go resources, such as elastic IP addresses (EIPs) or snapshots. These associated resources continue to incur charges.

  • If you delete an RDS MySQL instance but have configured a backup retention policy for after instance release, these backup files are retained. With this feature, backup storage is free of charge for 7 days after the instance is released. After 7 days, billing for the backup storage starts.

• Billing delay

  • Bills for pay-as-you-go resources are generated periodically, for example, hourly. After you release a resource, the bill for the final billing cycle is generated as scheduled. For example, if you release a resource at 10:08, the bill for the 10:00 to 11:00 hour is generated after 11:00.

Troubleshooting

1. Analyze the source of the charges: Log on to Bill Details. In the filter conditions, set the statistical item to Billable Item and the statistical period to Details to identify the cloud resource that is incurring charges.

2. Check the usage time: In Bill Details, view the usage time to confirm whether it falls within the final billing cycle of the released resource.

3. Check associated resources: When you release an instance, check and release its associated pay-as-you-go resources, such as deleting snapshots, releasing disks, or releasing pay-as-you-go EIP instances.

Possible cause: Free trial products use a pay-as-you-go model. To ensure your services are not interrupted, you receive reminder messages before the trial expires. After the trial, the instance is not automatically released and converts to a standard pay-as-you-go instance. Alternatively, your usage may have exceeded the free quota limit. Usage that exceeds the free quota is charged at the standard rate.

Possible causes

• The resource plan you purchased does not cover the billable item that is incurring charges. For example, a standard zone-redundant storage resource plan for Object Storage Service (OSS) cannot be used to offset charges for outbound traffic over the Internet.

• The region where you are using the product is not covered by the purchased resource plan.

• The resource plan has expired or its quota has been used up.

Troubleshooting steps

1. Check the resource plan status: Log on to the Expenses and Costs console > Account > Resource Plans. Check the resource plan's Status and Applicable Regions to confirm that it is active and has a remaining quota.

2. Confirm the coverage: Review the billing documentation for the Alibaba Cloud service to confirm the resource plan's coverage, and then check Bill Details to verify that the specific billable item is covered by the plan.

Possible cause: A sudden increase in costs is usually due to business fluctuations or automatic resource renewals. Alternatively, another user of the account may have purchased new resources.

• A sharp short-term increase in service access or data usage can lead to higher charges in usage-based billing scenarios. Examples include outbound traffic from ECS, outbound traffic over the Internet from OSS (traffic generated when accessing or downloading files stored in OSS from the Internet), and outbound traffic over the public network in mainland China from Content Delivery Network (CDN).

• When you enable auto-renewal for a subscription product, the system automatically renews it before the instance expires.

Troubleshooting

Explanation: Alibaba Cloud product pricing has a precision of 10 decimal places. This means that pay-as-you-go charges can be calculated with a precision of up to 10 decimal places. During the actual settlement process, Alibaba Cloud aggregates these charges and discards the values from the 3rd to the 10th decimal place. This discarded amount is called the "rounding adjustment amount". Rounding adjustments are calculated at the end of each month during settlement and appear on the detailed bill for the last day of the month. They do not appear on mid-month bills.