Savings Plans are suitable for businesses with synchronized, stable, or mixed workloads. This topic explains the benefits of choosing Savings Plans and compares them with other billing methods.
Benefits of Savings Plans
Flexible cloud usage: You can use Savings Plans with pay-as-you-go instances to offset the costs of various cloud resource types. This flexibility accommodates changing business needs and simplifies budget planning.
Deep discounts: You can receive significant discounts compared to the pay-as-you-go model.
Flexible payment options: When you purchase a Savings Plan, you can control the upfront payment amount to reduce pressure on your cash flow.
Applicable business models
Savings Plans are typically used with pay-as-you-go instances. Any usage that exceeds the plan's commitment is billed at the pay-as-you-go rate.
This billing method is ideal for businesses with stable overall resource usage, such as for system upgrades or cluster deployments. Even if you release and recreate instances, the total usage remains relatively constant. The Savings Plan billing method is suitable for the following business models:
Resonant services
Synchronized-demand businesses: These are businesses where the demand for related resources grows simultaneously as traffic increases.
Typical scenarios: Peak traffic for general Internet services, such as e-commerce sales promotions or hot spot events.
Suitable billing model: Savings Plans + Pay-as-you-go.
Mixed-workload businesses
Mixed-workload businesses: These businesses run multiple online services with different resource demands at different times. You can improve resource utilization by mixing online, offline, and job-based workloads.
Typical scenario: Large websites where hot spot services change at different times of the day.
Suitable billing model: Savings Plans.
Stable-workload businesses
Stable-workload businesses: These businesses have relatively stable operations with similar resource demands at different times.
Typical scenario: Internal Office Automation (OA) systems.
Suitable billing model: Savings Plans.
Comparison with other billing methods
Comparison Item | Subscription | Reserved Instance | Savings Plan |
Discount Limitations | Discount applies only to the specific purchased instance. | Discount applies only to specific instances. Instances must match the reservation to receive the discount. | Discount applies directly to your bill. It is not limited to a specific number of instances and offers high flexibility. |
Resource Reservation | Support | Support | Not supported |
Cross-product | Not supported | Support | Support |
Cross-region | Not supported | Not supported | Supported. Choose a General-purpose Savings Plan. |
Cross-zone within the same region | Not supported | Supported | Support |
Cross-instance family | Not supported | Not supported | Supported. Choose a General-purpose Savings Plan. |
Cross-instance type within the same family | Not supported | Support | Support |
Cross-operating system | Not supported | Not supported | Support |
Cross-account (based on financial hosting) | Not supported | Supported | Support |
Installment Support | Not supported | Supported | Supported. You can choose all upfront, partial upfront, or no upfront payment. |
Common scenarios
Variable resource usage
Consider the holding costs associated with changing resources. With a subscription model, actions such as upgrading, downgrading, or replacing an instance incur hidden costs that accumulate over time. In contrast, using Savings Plans with pay-as-you-go instances reduces these hidden costs when you switch resources.
Varying resource demands at different times
For example, your business department might use different resources during the day than your big data department uses at night. With subscription or reserved instances, resources can be idle for a significant amount of time. Savings Plans with pay-as-you-go allow discounts to be shared across instance families, which significantly lowers your total cost when you switch resources.
