Selection and Pricing

To meet diverse user requirements, we offer three billing methods: subscription, pay-as-you-go, and spot instances, allowing you to choose flexibly based on your needs.

Billing Method

ECS provides flexible billing methods to help you reduce usage costs.

• Pay-as-you-go (postpaid)

  Definition: Use first and pay later. Alibaba Cloud automatically deducts the fee for used resources from your account on an hourly basis.

  Scenarios: Suitable for short-term needs, fluctuating or bursty computing resource demands, allowing instant activation and deletion. Examples include temporary scaling, testing, and E-commerce flash sales.

  Metering method transformation: Pay-as-you-go can be changed to subscription.

• Spot instance (pay-as-you-go)

  Definition: An elastic billing method based on the pay-as-you-go billing method. The price fluctuates with supply and demand and offers a discount compared to standard pay-as-you-go instances. You are billed based on the actual usage duration.

  Scenarios: Scenarios where you are insensitive to the usage time of computing resources but sensitive to cost, such as temporary scaling, testing, and big data processing.

  Metering method conversion: Conversion to other metering methods is not currently supported.

• Subscription (prepaid)

  Definition: Pay first and use later. You pay upfront when purchasing an ECS instance, and longer subscription durations offer greater discounts.

  Scenarios: The resource usage epoch can be estimated, the business is stable and mature, and long-term resource usage is required. Examples include 7×24 web services and database services.

  Metering method transformation: Subscription can be changed to pay-as-you-go.

• Savings plan (subscription)

  Definition: A savings plan is a discount entitlement plan provided by Alibaba Cloud that can be used to offset bills for pay-as-you-go instances. By committing to consume a certain amount per hour over a fixed term (1/3/5 years), you receive a lower pay-as-you-go discount (comparable to subscription costs).

  Scenarios: Suitable for scenarios involving stable total usage over a long epoch (1/3/5 years) with elastic resource requirements. Examples include development environments for large websites and hybrid deployment scenarios in production environments.

  Billing method conversion: Subscription can be converted to a combination of pay-as-you-go and savings plan.

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