Alibaba Cloud CDN billing consists of required basic service fees and optional value-added service fees. This page explains how billing methods, billable items, billing regions, and billing cycles work together so you can estimate and control your CDN costs.
CDN bills by account UID.
Unless otherwise specified, pay-by-data-transfer, pay-by-peak-bandwidth measure outbound traffic, and monthly 95th percentile bandwidth are generated at L1 points of presence (POPs).
Domain names added in the CDN console with Business Type set to DCDN are billed based on DCDN pricing. Go to the DCDN console to view and use these domain names.
Alibaba Cloud CDN and DCDN can share data transfer plans, static HTTPS request resource plans, and Edge WAF request resource plans.
CDN and DCDN are billed separately.
Bills are generated 3 to 4 hours after a billing cycle ends.
Choose a billing method
CDN supports two billing methods: pay-as-you-go (default, post-paid) and resource plans (prepaid). The right choice depends on how predictable your traffic is.
Traffic pattern | Billing method | How it works | Pricing |
Volatile — significant peaks and troughs, or unpredictable | Pay-as-you-go | Fees are calculated based on actual usage each billing cycle. Use the service first, pay later. | |
Stable — predictable monthly usage | Resource plans | Purchase capacity in advance. Usage is deducted from your resource plan first. Excess usage is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. |
Choose pay-as-you-go if your traffic spikes unpredictably or you need maximum flexibility without upfront commitment.
Choose resource plans if your monthly usage is stable and predictable, and you want a more cost-effective option with built-in cost control.
For details on selecting and managing resource plans, see Resource plan overview, Select a resource plan, and Resource plan deduction rules.
Billable items
CDN billing has two categories:
Basic service fees (required): Core CDN acceleration fees. Select one metering method — pay-by-data-transfer (default) or pay-by-peak-bandwidth, or monthly 95th percentile bandwidth. For pricing and rules, see Billing of basic services.
Value-added service fees (optional, billed separately): Fees for advanced features such as HTTPS requests for static content, QUIC requests for static content, and real-time log delivery. For details, see Billing of value-added services.
Key concepts
Outbound traffic and origin traffic
Outbound traffic (billable): Traffic generated when users download data from CDN POPs through browsers or clients. This is the primary billable item for basic services.
Origin traffic (not billed by CDN): Traffic generated when CDN POPs pull data from your origin server such as an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance or an Object Storage Service (OSS) bucket, because the content is not cached or the cache has expired. CDN does not bill this traffic, but your origin server may incur outbound traffic fees.
Billing regions
The system determines a user's region based on their IP address and applies the unit price of that region. CDN has deployed POPs across all billing regions worldwide. For a complete list of countries and regions in each billing region, see POP distribution.
Billing region | Abbreviation | Countries and regions |
Chinese mainland | CN | Chinese mainland (billed as a single region) |
North America | NA | United States |
Europe | EU | Ukraine, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Spain |
Asia Pacific 1 | AP1 | China (Hong Kong), Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia |
Asia Pacific 2 | AP2 | Indonesia, India, South Korea, Pakistan |
Asia Pacific 3 | AP3 | Australia |
Middle East/Africa | MEAA | Türkiye, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Nigeria, South Africa |
South America | SA | Brazil |
Billing cycles
Billing cycle | Bill generation | Reference |
Hourly | Bills are generated approximately 3 to 4 hours after each billing cycle ends. | Basic services: Pay-by-data-transfer Value-added services: |
Daily | The bill for the previous day is generated and fees are deducted at around 04:00 a.m. every day. The actual bill generation time is subject to the system. | Basic services: Pay-by-peak-bandwidth |
Monthly | Around 04:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar month that follows the end of the current billing cycle. | Basic services: Monthly 95th percentile bandwidth |
Video tutorial
This video is in Chinese only.
References
Metering methods
Resource plans
Billing management