Savings plans are applicable to linked, stable, and hybrid services. This topic describes the benefits of savings plans and the comparison between savings plans and other payment methods.
Benefits
Flexible use of Alibaba Cloud resources: Savings plans can be applied to pay-as-you-go instances to offset the fees generated by Alibaba Cloud resources of different types. This helps meet dynamic business requirements and simplify budget planning.
Ultra-high discounts: Compared with the pay-as-you-go billing method, savings plans can offer a discount of up to 76% off.
User-friendly purchase: When you purchase savings plans, you can select different upfront payment ratios based on your cash pressure.
Supported business scenarios
Savings plans are applied to pay-as-you-go instances. The excess consumption amount that cannot be offset by savings plans is billed based on the regular pay-as-you-go price.
Savings plans are suitable for business scenarios such as system upgrades and cluster deployment, in which the overall usage is relatively stable with instances released and created. Savings plans can be applied to the following business scenarios:
Linked services
Definition: Services are linked with each other. When traffic increases, the resource demand of each service increases at the same time.
Typical services: pan-Internet traffic peaks such as e-commerce promotion activities and hot issues.
Recommended billing method: savings plans + pay-as-you-go.
Hybrid services
Definition: Multiple services are deployed online and have different resource demands in different periods of time. Online, offline, and job-based services are deployed in a hybrid manner to increase resource utilization.
Typical services: large-scale websites that provide different major services in different periods of time.
Recommended billing method: savings plans.
Stable services
Definition: The services are relatively stable and have similar resource demands in different periods of time.
Typical services: internal office automation (OA) systems.
Recommended billing method: savings plans.
Comparison with other payment methods
Comparison item | Subscription | Reserved instance | Savings plan |
Limits on discounts | Discounts are provided only for specific instances. | Discounts are provided only for specific instances and must be matched with the instances when the discounts take effect. | Savings plans can be directly used to offset service bills regardless of the number of instances. |
Resource reservation | Supported | Supported | Not supported |
Use across services | Not supported | Supported | Supported |
Use across regions | Not supported | Not supported | Supported by general-purpose savings plans |
Use across zones within the same region | Not supported | Supported | Supported |
Use across instance families | Not supported | Not supported | Supported by general-purpose savings plans |
Use across instance types within the same instance family | Not supported | Supported | Supported |
Use across operating systems | Not supported | Not supported | Supported |
Use across accounts based on established trusteeship | Not supported | Supported | Supported |
Installment | Not supported | Supported | Supported (All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront) |
Typical scenarios
Use of variable resources
The subscription billing method and the combination of savings plans and the pay-as-you-go billing method can incur different retention costs in the same business scenario. To use different resources, you may need to change the configurations of existing resources or create new resources after existing resources are released. However, the preceding operations incur implicit costs. The accumulated implicit costs increase the total subscription fees. To reduce the implicit costs incurred by resource changes, we recommend that you use savings plans with the pay-as-you-go billing method.
Dynamic resource demands in different periods of time
For example, the resources used by the business department during the day differ from those used by the big data department at night. In this case, if subscription or reserved instances are applied, the resources are idle for almost half of the time each day. However, if you use savings plans with the pay-as-you-go billing method, instances across instance families share the discounts of savings plans. This significantly reduces the total resource costs.
