Cloud Data Transfer (CDT) unifies bandwidth billing across Alibaba Cloud services. CDT offers free quotas, pay-by-data-transfer, and tiered pricing to reduce your bandwidth costs.
CDT applies tiered pricing to monthly Internet data transfers per region — the more you transfer, the lower the unit price.
CDT meters inter-region data transfers on a pay-by-data-transfer basis, so you can enable cross-region communication as needed.
Benefits
Free data transfers: Starting June 1, 2025, CDT provides 220 GB of free Internet data transfers per month — 20 GB for regions in the Chinese mainland and 200 GB only for regions outside the Chinese mainland.
Cost effective: CDT applies tiered pricing to Internet data transfers. The pricing tier is determined by total data transfers accumulated across services in each region — the more you transfer, the lower the unit price.
Flexible metering: Inter-region data transfers use pay-by-data-transfer metering — you pay only for what you use.
Multiple supported services: For more information, see Supported products.
FinOps support: CDT separates resource creation from billing to improve delivery efficiency. CDT bills Internet and inter-region data transfers for different Alibaba Cloud services. You can tag resources and split data transfer bills by tag, giving business, IT, and finance teams better cost visibility and predictability.
Enable CDT
Log on to the CDT console, find the target service, click Upgrade, and complete the configuration. Getting started.
Starting 00:00:00 on December 12, 2024, you can use CDT without prior activation.
After you enable CDT for cloud services, all existing and new pay-by-data-transfer instances are billed by CDT. Pay-by-bandwidth instances remain billed by the original Alibaba Cloud services. Query CDT bills on the Bill Details page in the Expenses and Costs console.
After you activate CDT, you receive 220 GB of free Internet data transfers per month — 20 GB for regions in the Chinese mainland and 200 GB only for regions outside the Chinese mainland.
Activating CDT is free — no additional activation fees apply.
CDT billing is not automatically enabled for services such as ECS instances. To bill a service through CDT, log on to the CDT console, find the target service, and click Upgrade to manually opt in. Only services you have upgraded are billed through CDT; services that have not been upgraded continue to be billed by the original Alibaba Cloud service.
For more information about how to upgrade to CDT billing, see Upgrade to CDT billing.
Can CDT be disabled?
Cloud Data Transfer (CDT) is a unified billing service. Once activated, CDT cannot be disabled. To stop incurring CDT charges, stop or release the pay-by-data-transfer resources of the relevant Alibaba Cloud services — such as public IP addresses of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, NAT Gateways, or CLB instances — instead of trying to disable CDT itself.