This topic describes the factors that affect the discounts provided by savings plans and how to purchase an appropriate savings plan.
Factors that affect the discounts provided by savings plans
In principle, when you purchase a savings plan, if you select a longer purchase duration and a higher upfront payment ratio and the type of the savings plan more suits your resource specifications, the discount provided by the savings plan is greater. You can purchase an optimal savings plan based on your business requirements. The following factors affect the discounts provided by savings plans:
The purchase duration of the savings plan. Savings plans with a longer purchase duration provide greater discounts. You can purchase 5-year, 3-year, or 1-year savings plans based on your business requirements.
The payment option of the savings plan. Savings plans with a higher upfront payment ratio provide greater discounts. All Upfront savings plans provide the greatest discounts, followed by Partial Upfront savings plans and then No Upfront savings plans.
The specifications of the Alibaba Cloud service to which the savings plan is applied, such as the region and instance type.
The following figure shows the discounts provided by different savings plans on pay-as-you-go Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances.
Offset logic of savings plans
Savings plans and reserved instances can be applied to offset the bills of pay-as-you-go instances. If you have multiple discount plans, the discount plans are applied in the following sequence:
Reserved instances and resource plans such as storage capacity units (SCUs)
Savings plans
Take note of the following rules when you use savings plans:
If your pay-as-you-go instances are billed based on a discount that is higher than the discounts provided by your savings plans, the higher discount is applied and the discounted charges are offset by the committed consumption amount of the savings plans.
If you have multiple savings plans that provide different discounts, the plans take effect in the order in which they were purchased. For example, if you purchase an All Upfront savings plan and then a Partial Upfront savings plan, the All Upfront savings plan takes effect before the Partial Upfront savings plan.
Purchase a savings plan
The User Center console provides the recommendation feature to generate recommendations on savings plans based on your historical purchase records.
Log on to the User Center console. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Savings Plan > Recommended.
Configure the parameters such as Reference product and Historical Purchase Records.
Purchase a savings plan based on the provided recommendation.
If you are not satisfied with the recommendation or have few historical consumption records, you can directly click Purchase to purchase a savings plan on the Savings Plans buy page based on your business requirements.