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Expenses and Costs:Bill guide

Last Updated:Nov 19, 2025

Bill features

Bills provide a monthly summary of your consumption on Alibaba Cloud, detailing the usage of cloud resources. Bill management provides the following features: bill overview and bill details.

Bill type

Scenarios

Description

Issuance time

Bill overview

The bill overview provides a monthly summary of your bills by aggregating the usage details of your cloud resources. It serves as the primary credential for cost reviews, reconciliation, invoicing, and payments.

You can view an overview of your bills for each billing month. This includes viewing the bill amount for a specific month, aggregating bill reports by different dimensions, exporting monthly bills, and performing unified settlement.

The amount and status of the bill for the current month are continuously updated.

The final monthly bill is generated after 12:00 on the 2nd of the following month. Repayments and invoicing must be based on the final bill generated after this time.

Bill details

Bill details provide itemized usage data for your cloud resources within a billing cycle. You can use these details to verify usage, pricing, and discounts, and to understand how your costs are calculated.

Bill details provide the most granular billing information. Each charge corresponds to a separate bill record. You can use bill details to view your detailed spending on Alibaba Cloud. This includes information about cloud product instances, pricing for billable items, discounts, usage, and payable amounts.

Bill details for the current month are continuously updated based on your pay-as-you-go resource usage and subscription resource purchases. For example, a detailed bill record is generated every hour for a pay-as-you-go resource that is billed hourly.

The complete and final bill details for the month are generated after 12:00 on the 3rd of the following month. Data queried before this time is for reference only and must not be used for reconciliation.

If you have other requirements for bills, such as secondary bill splitting or cost analysis for enterprise management, refer to the following table.

Feature

Scenario

Description

Issuance time

Usage details

Download cloud resource usage details.

You can export the original usage details of cloud resources.

  1. The cloud resource usage in the current month is continuously updated.

  2. The final usage details for the current month are issued after 12:00 (UTC+8) on the second day of the following month.

Bill splitting details

This feature displays fine-grained bills after you perform bill splitting. This feature is suitable for secondary bill splitting or cost analysis for enterprise management.

You can split bills in a fine-grained manner to allocate cloud resource fees to meet requirements such as enterprise management, cost analysis, or resource-level cost control.

Note
  • The bill splitting details generated before the final issuance time are for reference only. To reconcile bills, the final bill splitting details shall prevail.

  • You must first activate this feature. Bill splitting details are displayed 24 hours after you activate this feature.

  • The bill splitting granularity of cloud resources is different from the metering and billing granularity of cloud resources. For example, the billing granularity of Object Storage Service (OSS) buckets is region but the bill splitting granularity of OSS buckets is bucket. As a result, the bill splitting feature does not provide the calculation process of resource usage, bill amounts, and discounts.

  1. The bill splitting details of bills in the current month are continuously updated as the pay-as-you-go or subscription fees of cloud resources increase. For example, a bill is generated each hour for a pay-as-you-go cloud resource that is billed on an hourly basis. The bill splitting details are updated as hourly bills are generated.

  2. The final bill splitting details for the current month are issued at 12:00 (UTC+8) on the fourth day of the following month. The bill splitting details generated before the final issuance time are for reference only. To reconcile bills, the final bill splitting details shall prevail.