What Is a Savings Plan?
A Savings Plan is a discount benefit plan. You commit to spending a fixed amount per hour for a set term. In return, you receive a deeper discount on your pay-as-you-go resource bills—excluding spot instances. A Savings Plan does not provide resources directly. You must use it with pay-as-you-go resources.
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Compared to pay-as-you-go, it offers a lower cost.
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Compared to subscription, it is more flexible. You can combine it with pay-as-you-go resources to handle changes, such as instance upgrades or downgrades, or instance releases and recreations.
How Savings Plans Work
After you activate a Savings Plan to offset pay-as-you-go resource costs, the system charges you for the hourly committed spend amount and applies the discount to your hourly pay-as-you-go bill based on these rules:
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Billed hourly: The system charges you the committed spend amount every hour.
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Overage charges: If your hourly pay-as-you-go bill exceeds the amount covered by your commitment, you pay the overage at standard pay-as-you-go rates.
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You pay the full commitment even if unused: If your actual discounted usage in an hour is less than your committed spend amount, you still pay the full commitment.
After activation, the system charges your committed spend amount every hour, even if you have no eligible pay-as-you-go resources to offset. If you do not plan to use related pay-as-you-go resources, you can release them promptly to avoid unnecessary charges.
Example (Committed Amount vs. Actual Usage)
The normal pay-as-you-go price for an ECS instance is 12 USD per instance per hour. With a savings plan, the discounted price is 4.75 USD per instance per hour.
The user purchases a Savings Plan and commits to an hourly spend of 95 USD/hour. The maximum number of instances that can be covered is 95/4.75 = 20.
Your actual usage: 25 instances running in Hour 1, and 15 instances running in Hour 2.
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Billing method |
Hour 1 cost |
Hour 2 cost |
Total cost |
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Pay-as-you-go |
25 units * 12 USD/unit/hour * 1 hour = 300 USD |
15 units*12 USD/unit/hour*1 hour=180 USD |
480 USD |
|
Savings Plan + pay-as-you-go |
Committed cost 95USD Overage cost (25 units – 95/4.75 units) × 12 USD/unit/hour × 1 hour = 60 USD |
Committed cost 95 USD Overage cost 0 USD |
250 USD |
Discount priority
When multiple discounts apply, they are applied in this order from highest to lowest priority: reserved instances, resource plans (such as Storage Capacity Units), and then Savings Plans.
In addition:
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If your pay-as-you-go rate already includes a larger discount: That larger discount applies first. The remaining cost after that discount may still be offset against your Savings Plan commitment.
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If you have multiple Savings Plans: They usually take effect in order of purchase, not based on discount rate.
Why Choose a Savings Plan?
Key benefits
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Flexible cloud usage: You can use it with pay-as-you-go resources to offset costs across multiple services. It adapts to changing business needs and simplifies budget planning.
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Flexible payment options: You can choose your upfront payment ratio to ease cash flow pressure.
Best-fit business models
Savings Plans work best when paired with pay-as-you-go resources in scenarios where overall usage stays relatively stable, but instance types or specifications may change. Examples include system upgrades and cluster deployments. Typical use cases include the following:
Comparison with other billing methods (summary)
|
Comparison item |
Subscription |
Reserved Instances |
Savings Plan |
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Discount limits |
Applies only to one specific instance |
Applies only to matching instances |
Offsets total bill consumption. No limit on number of instances. More flexible. |
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Cross-product support |
Not supported |
Supported |
Supported |
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Cross-region |
Not supported |
Not supported |
Supported (General-purpose) |
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Cross-instance family |
Not supported |
Not supported |
Supported (General-purpose) |
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Payment flexibility (installments or upfront) |
Not supported |
Supported |
Supported (all upfront, partial upfront, or zero upfront) |
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Cross-account support (via Financial Cloud hosting) |
Not supported |
Supported |
Supported |
Cloud products supported by Savings Plans
|
Savings Plan type |
Eligible cloud products |
Eligible items |
Purchase link |
|
General-purpose Savings Plan |
ECS, ECI Note
ECS and ECI share one Savings Plan. |
Elastic Computing Service (ECS) – pay-as-you-go, Elastic Container Instance (ECI), instant capacity reservation, disk, disk performance |
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General-purpose Transit Router Savings Plan |
TransitRouter |
TransitRouter |
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Wanxiang Savings Plan |
Covers image generation count and video generation duration for Wanxiang series models. Does not cover Qwen text-to-image model usage. |
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LLM Inference Savings Plan |
Covers token usage for large language model inference text generation on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio—including Qwen Max, Qwen Plus, Qwen Flash, Qwen Coder, Qwen Long, Qwen VL, and third-party text generation models listed on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. |
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FAQ
What happens if I buy a Savings Plan but have no pay-as-you-go resources right now?
You are still charged the hourly committed spend amount. You should estimate your commitment carefully before purchase to avoid idle spend.
Does a Savings Plan provide resources or lock specific instances?
No. It does not provide resources or bind to any specific instance. It is a discount benefit applied to your bill, subject to the coverage rules of the plan type you purchased.
When I have resource plans, reserved instances, and a Savings Plan, which applies first?
Priority is typically reserved instances, resource plans > Savings Plan. If your pay-as-you-go rate already includes a larger discount, that discount applies first.