A savings plan is a discount plan that can be applied to offset the bills of pay-as-you-go instances, excluding preemptible instances. This topic describes the definition and mechanism of savings plans.
Definition
A savings plan is a discount plan that Alibaba Cloud provides. When you purchase a savings plan, you make a commitment to use a consistent amount of resources on an hourly basis for a specific period of time, such as one year or three years, to receive discounted billing. A savings plan is more cost-effective than the pay-as-you-go billing method. Compared with the subscription billing method, the combination of savings plans and the pay-as-you-go billing method is more flexible.
After you purchase a savings plan, the savings plan does not provide resources that are eligible for the savings plan but can be applied to eligible pay-as-you-go resources to provide billing discounts. If you do not have eligible pay-as-you-go resources after you purchase a savings plan, you are charged the hourly commitment that is associated with the savings plan.
Mechanism
After you purchase a savings plan, you are charged based on the hourly spend commitment that is associated with the savings plan, as shown in the following figure. The savings plan can cover your pay-as-you-go resource usage up to the hourly spend commitment. Usage beyond the hourly spend commitment is billed based on regular pay-as-you-go rates. If the hourly discounted spend of all your pay-as-you-go resources that are matched to a savings plan does not exceed the hourly spend commitment associated with the savings plan, you are still charged the hourly spend commitment.
After you purchase a savings plan, you are charged the spend commitment regardless of whether you use pay-as-you-go resources. To reduce costs, we recommend that you release the pay-as-you-go resources that you no longer need at the earliest opportunit.
Example:
The regular pay-as-you-go unit price of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) Instance Type A is USD 12/instance/hour. The discounted unit price of ECS Instance Type A after a savings plan is used is USD 4.75/instance/hour.
You purchase a savings plan and commit to an hourly consumption amount of USD 95. Therefore, the maximum number of instances that can be discounted is 95/4.75 = 20.
In the actual usage, you run 25 instances of Instance Type A in the first hour and 15 instances of Instance Type A in the second hour.
Billing method | Fee for the first hour | Fee for the second hour | Total fee |
Pay-as-you-go | 25 × USD 12 × 1 = USD 300 | 15 × USD 12 × 1 = USD 180 | 480 USD |
Pay-as-you-go + Savings plan | Committed amount: 95 USD Fee exceeding the committed amount: (25 - 95/4.75) × USD 12 × 1 = USD 60 | Committed amount: 95 USD Fee exceeding the committed amount: 0 USD | 250 USD |
Supported Alibaba Cloud services
Savings plan | Supported cloud service | Applicable item |
ECS compute savings plans | ECS and Elastic Container Instance Note ECS and Elastic Container Instance share a savings plan. | Pay-as-you-go ECS instances, elastic container instances, and immediate capacity reservations |
General-purpose savings plans | ECS and Elastic Container Instance Note ECS and Elastic Container Instance share a savings plan. | Pay-as-you-go ECS instances, elastic container instances, immediate capacity reservations, cloud disks, and disk performance |