Hourly billing lets you temporarily scale out concurrent slots for your exclusive resource group of the data transfer service during business peak hours, without prepaying for extra subscription capacity. Billing starts when scale-out succeeds and stops when scale-in succeeds.
When to use hourly billing
Use hourly billing when your workload requires extra concurrency for 16 hours or fewer per day. For sustained high-concurrency needs exceeding 16 hours per day, purchasing additional subscription reserved concurrency is more cost-effective.
Billing mode | Payment | Best for |
Hourly billing | Pay-as-you-go after use | Short peak windows (16 hours/day or fewer) |
Subscription | Prepaid monthly | Sustained high-concurrency needs (more than 16 hours/day) |
How it works
Hourly billing scales reserved concurrency elastically on top of your existing subscription specification:
Trigger a scale-out through the Time-specific Configuration feature in your quota settings. The scale-out temporarily increases concurrency resources for the level-1 quota of the subscription specification. The maximum scale-out amount is limited to the subscription reserved concurrency purchased for the corresponding quota.
Billing starts immediately when scale-out succeeds. Charges are based on the number of concurrent slots and the duration of use.
Trigger scale-in when the peak window ends. Billing stops when scale-in succeeds.
The system pushes metering results every hour and at each concurrency change. Bills are generated 3 hours after metering.
Release resources promptly when they are no longer needed. Slots continue to be billed until scale-in succeeds.
For scale-out requests exceeding 4,000 concurrent slots, contact technical support for an assessment before proceeding. For more information, see How to get online support?.
Pricing
Hourly billing is charged per slot per hour. The rate depends on the region.
Region | Price |
China (Hangzhou), China (Beijing), China (Shanghai), China (Shenzhen) | USD 0.023/Slot/hour |
China (Hong Kong), Singapore, Indonesia (Jakarta), US (Virginia) | USD 0.037/Slot/hour |
Charges accumulate from the moment scale-out succeeds until scale-in succeeds. If you use more than 16 hours per day, purchasing subscription reserved concurrency is more cost-effective.
Related topics
To set up time-based elastic scaling for the data transfer service, see Time-specific configuration for data transmission service.
To purchase or manage exclusive resource groups for stable data transmission, see Purchase and use exclusive resource groups for Data Transmission Service.
For subscription billing details on exclusive resource groups, see Data transfer pricing for exclusive resources (subscription).
For data download fees (Internet egress), see Data transfer pricing (Internet download).