A savings plan is a flexible pricing model that discounts your Pay-as-you-go instances (excluding Preemptible Instances). This topic describes savings plan and how they work.
Definition
A savings plan is a discount program from Alibaba Cloud that offers lower rates when you commit to a specific hourly spend over a one- or three-year term. This model costs less than standard Pay-as-you-go rates and provides more flexibility than a Subscription for Pay-as-you-go resources.
A savings plan does not provision resources directly. You must use it with existing or new Pay-as-you-go resources. If you have no eligible Pay-as-you-go resources, you are still billed for your hourly committed spend.
How it works
When you purchase a savings plan to cover your Pay-as-you-go resources, Alibaba Cloud bills you for your hourly committed spend. Usage exceeding your hourly commitment is charged at standard Pay-as-you-go rates. If your actual usage in an hour is less than your hourly committed spend, you are still billed for the full hourly committed spend amount.
After you purchase a savings plan, you are billed for your committed spend even if you have no active Pay-as-you-go resources. Therefore, if you no longer need your Pay-as-you-go resources, release them promptly to avoid unnecessary charges.
Example:
The standard Pay-as-you-go price for an ECS Instance is USD 12 per instance per hour. With a savings plan, the discounted price is USD 4.75 per instance per hour.
Suppose a user purchases a savings plan with an hourly committed spend of USD 95. This commitment covers up to 20 instances (95 / 4.75).
Scenario: The user runs 25 instances in the first hour and 15 instances in the second hour.
Billing method | Hour 1 cost | Hour 2 cost | Total cost |
Pay-as-you-go | 25 instances × USD12/instance/hour × 1 hour = USD 300 | 15 instances × USD12/instance/hour × 1 hour = USD180 | USD480 |
Savings plan + Pay-as-you-go | Committed spend USD 95 Overage cost (25 - 20) instances USD × 12 USD/instance/hour × 1 hour = USD 60 | Committed spend USD 95 Overage cost USD 0 | USD250 |
Supported cloud products
Savings plan type | Deductible cloud products | Deductible items | Purchase link |
General-purpose | Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Elastic Container Instance (ECI) Note A single General-purpose Savings Plan covers both ECS and ECI. | ECS, ECI, Immediate Capacity Reservation, Cloud Disk, Cloud Disk performance | |
Transit Router | Transit Router | Transit Router | |
Tongyi Wanxiang (Wan) | Covers Usage for image generation (by count) and video generation (by duration) with the Tongyi Wanxiang (Wan) series of models. It does not cover usage for the text-to-image model from Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen). | ||
Large language model (LLM) inference | Covers token Usage for text generation from LLM inference on the Alibaba Cloud Bailian platform. This includes models such as Tongyi Qianwen-max, Tongyi Qianwen-plus, Tongyi Qianwen-flash, Tongyi Qianwen-coder, Tongyi Qianwen-long, and Tongyi Qianwen-VL, and third-party models available on the Alibaba Cloud Bailian platform. | ||