Alibaba Cloud DevOps (Region-based) has three billing categories: R&D resources, user licenses, and AI assistant usage. R&D resources include free quotas, and user license fees depend on your collaboration mode.
Activating Alibaba Cloud DevOps
Before you use Alibaba Cloud DevOps (Region-based), you must activate pay-as-you-go billing. After activation, you can create an Alibaba Cloud DevOps organization. When you activate Alibaba Cloud DevOps, Alibaba Cloud DevOps creates a pay-as-you-go order and bills you based on your actual usage.
Alibaba Cloud DevOps does not support direct purchase or activation with virtual operator accounts. If an enterprise member account is a virtual operator account or a sub-account, it also cannot complete orders. Solution: Invite a real-name verified regular Alibaba Cloud main account to join the Alibaba Cloud DevOps organization, transfer the organization owner permissions to that account, and let it purchase and place orders.
R&D resource billing
Resource types
Alibaba Cloud DevOps (Region-based) provides four types of R&D resources to support scenarios such as code hosting, continuous integration, and artifact management.
| Resource type | Unit | Description |
| Code Git storage | GiB | Total storage of Git data across all code repositories, excluding resources in the recycle bin |
| Code LFS storage | GiB | Total LFS storage across all code repositories, excluding resources in the recycle bin |
| Artifact storage | GiB | Total storage across all artifact repositories, including artifacts in the repository recycle bin |
| Pipeline build resources | Core-minutes | Total build core-minutes of all pipeline tasks that use Alibaba Cloud DevOps managed build clusters |
Core-minute formula:
Core-minutes = Pipeline task build duration (minutes) × Build environment CPU cores
Example: A task that runs for 10 minutes on a 4-core build machine consumes 10 × 4 = 40 core-minutes.
Pipelines do not consume core-minutes during manual wait stages such as approvals and confirmations, and no runtime fees are charged. Core-minutes are calculated and consumed only when a build or compile task actually uses an Alibaba Cloud DevOps managed build cluster.
Free quota
Each Alibaba Cloud account is entitled to the following free R&D resource quotas. If your usage stays within the free quotas, you pay nothing for R&D resources. Only the portion of usage that exceeds the free quota is billed.
| Resource type | Free quota |
| Code Git storage | 20 GiB |
| Code LFS storage | 20 GiB |
| Artifact storage | 10 GiB |
| Pipeline build resources | 3000 core-minutes per month (resets each calendar month) |
If you create multiple Alibaba Cloud DevOps organizations under one account, these organizations share the R&D resource quotas. The system aggregates R&D resource usage across all organizations before billing.
The pipeline free quota is granted per calendar month and resets to 3000 core-minutes on the first day of each month.
Pricing
The unit prices for the four types of R&D resources are:
| Resource type | Unit price |
| Code Git storage | USD 1/GiB/month |
| Code LFS storage | USD 0.2/GiB/month |
| Artifact storage | USD 0.2/GiB/month |
| Pipeline build resources | USD 0.005/core-minute |
Daily unit price calculation example: monthly unit price × 12 months ÷ 365 days
For example, the daily unit price of 1 GiB of Code Git storage is 1 × 12 ÷ 365 = USD 0.0328767123.
Storage R&D resources are reported once per day, and the billing cycle is also daily. Because each month has a different number of days, the monthly cost varies slightly. For example, if your total Code Git storage is 21 GiB, the free quota covers 20 GiB, leaving 1 GiB of billable storage. Billed at the unit price in the preceding table, the monthly cost is approximately USD 1. The cost in January is slightly higher than in February.
User license billing
Collaboration modes
User license billing depends on the collaboration mode of your Alibaba Cloud DevOps organization. Alibaba Cloud DevOps (Region-based) offers two collaboration modes with different features. Choose the one that fits your R&D collaboration needs.
| Feature | Personal Mode | Enterprise Collaboration Mode |
| Audience | Startup R&D teams and individual developers | Enterprise R&D teams with strict requirements for R&D data security and process compliance |
| Login method | Username and password | Username and password, or single sign-on (SSO) |
| Enterprise identity source integration | Not supported | Alibaba Cloud RAM, SAML, and Feishu (Lark); other identity sources are under development |
| VPC access | Not supported | VPC domain names and enterprise VPC integration |
| R&D asset backup | Not supported | Code repository backup |
| IP whitelist | Not supported | IP whitelist configuration |
| Audit logs | Not supported | Push operation logs to ActionTrail |
| User license fee | No fee | Billed daily per active user |
| Account and organization limits | Up to 5 accounts; 1 organization per region | No user or organization limits |
User license pricing
In Personal Mode, you do not pay user license fees, but you can create at most 5 accounts.
Enterprise Collaboration Mode has no user limit and is billed daily based on the actual number of users: USD 0.4/user/day.
User licenses are billed once per day, based on the total number of active users on that day. For example, if a new member joins today, today's cost increases. If someone leaves tomorrow, the cost decreases.
User license fees start accruing as soon as an Enterprise Collaboration Mode organization is created. You do not need to invite members, and no one needs to log in. When you create the organization, you provide an administrator account and password, and the system automatically creates that administrator account and adds it to the organization. The administrator account is in the In use state from the moment the organization is created, so the organization is billed for at least one user license from the day it is created, at USD 0.4 per day. Fees incurred on a given day appear on the next day's bill.
User licenses are metered as follows: only members in the In use state are counted. Members in the Not logged in, Disabled, or Deleted state are not counted. Daily usage is calculated based on the peak number of active users at any point during the day. As a result, if you disable or remove a member partway through the day, that day is still billed at the peak count, and the reduced fee takes effect from the next day.
The owner of an Alibaba Cloud DevOps organization is always an Alibaba Cloud main account, regardless of whether the organization was created by a main account or a RAM user (sub-account). User license fees are charged to that Alibaba Cloud main account and appear on its bill. Multiple Alibaba Cloud DevOps organizations created under the same Alibaba Cloud main account have their user licenses measured separately by each organization's own active user count, and each organization's fees are charged to the main account. Unlike R&D resource quotas, which are shared across organizations under an account, user licenses are measured separately for each organization. Purchase and order operations have additional account type restrictions. For details, see Activating Alibaba Cloud DevOps.
AI assistant billing
The Alibaba Cloud DevOps AI assistant uses credits (AI_Credits) as a unified unit of measurement. Alibaba Cloud DevOps administrators can view the AI assistant's credit usage on the Admin Console > AI Usage page.
Fees for the Alibaba Cloud DevOps AI assistant are collected by STAROps (All-Domain Intelligent O&M Platform). For the billing rules, see the STAROps Billing overview. STAROps provides AI assistant services for products such as CloudMonitor (CMS), Simple Log Service (SLS), and Alibaba Cloud DevOps. To learn about STAROps capabilities, see What is STAROps.
Overdue payment and service suspension
To ensure service continuity, Alibaba Cloud DevOps provides the following overdue buffer strategy:
| Stage | Timing | Impact |
| Normal service | Sufficient balance | All features work normally |
| Service suspension | Immediate suspension after overdue payment | All Alibaba Cloud DevOps organizations are unavailable |
| Resource release | Released 15 days after suspension | All Alibaba Cloud DevOps organizations are released and deleted |
After your payment becomes overdue, Alibaba Cloud DevOps suspends service immediately. If you have enabled the suspension deferral service, the suspension is delayed per the service's rules.
After an Alibaba Cloud DevOps organization is released, its R&D data cannot be recovered. R&D data includes projects, code repositories, pipelines, artifact repositories, and test case libraries.
Viewing Alibaba Cloud DevOps bills
View and filter Alibaba Cloud DevOps bills in Alibaba Cloud Billing Management:
Log on to the Alibaba Cloud console and go to the Billing Management > Bill Details page.
On the bills page, select the query time range and filter for Alibaba Cloud DevOps fee records.
If you cannot find certain pay-as-you-go items in Billing Management, log on to the Alibaba Cloud DevOps Admin Console and switch between regions (such as Hangzhou and Beijing) to check each. Alibaba Cloud DevOps bills each region independently, and billing resources may be in a specific region.