Billing

Billable components

The following SOFAStack components are billable. All of them support the pay-as-you-go billing method.

• Microservice Platform

• Message Queue

• Continuous Delivery

• Data Access Proxy

• Task Scheduling

• API Gateway

• Real-time Monitoring Service (RMS)

  Note

  In addition to the pay-as-you-go billing method, RMS also offers flexible and cost-effective subscription resource plans. For more information, see Overview of RMS billable items.

Billing rules

Microservice Platform

The Microservice Platform is billed hourly based on the number of application nodes. It uses tiered pricing, and the billing unit is CNY/hour. The billing rules are as follows:

Billing example

The following example shows how to calculate the monthly fee for a public cloud user:

• If you have 100 active application nodes in a month, the monthly fee is (5 * 0.00 + 95 * 0.25) * 24 * 30 = 17,100 CNY.

• If you have 500 active application nodes in a month, the monthly fee is (5 * 0.00 + 95 * 0.25 + 100 * 0.23 + 300 * 0.19) * 24 * 30 = 74,700 CNY.

Message Queue

Message Queue is billed based on two dimensions: API calls and topic resource usage.

• API calls: This fee is based on the total number of monthly API calls. It uses tiered pricing, is settled hourly, and the billing unit is CNY/million calls/hour.

  Note

  • You receive a free quota of 20 million API calls per month.

  • API calls for messages other than normal messages are counted as four times the number of API calls for normal messages.

• Topic resource usage: This fee is based on the total number of daily API calls for a topic. It uses tiered pricing, is settled daily, and the billing unit is CNY/topic/day.

  Note

  The topic resource usage fee is essentially a storage fee.

Both billing dimensions are applied simultaneously. The specific billing rules are as follows:

API call billing

Topic resource usage billing

The topic resource usage fee uses tiered pricing based on the number of daily API calls for each topic.

Billing example

Assume a public cloud user has one topic. The usage on the first day is as follows:

The billing for that day is as follows:

• Topic resource usage fee: The total number of API calls for the day is 2,810 * 1 million = 2.81 billion. This falls into Tier 4, where the unit price is 0.00. The topic resource usage fee is 0 CNY.

• API call fee:

  • At 00:00, the number of API calls is 10 * 1 million = 10 million. This is within the monthly free quota of 20 million. The remaining free quota is 10 million. The API call fee at 00:00 is 0 CNY.

  • At 01:00, the number of API calls is 800 * 1 million = 800 million. After deducting the remaining free quota of 10 million, the remaining 790 million calls are billed under Tier 1 (0 to 1 billion calls), where the unit price is 2.00 CNY. The API call fee at 01:00 is 790 * 2.00 = 1,580.00 CNY. The remaining quota in Tier 1 is 1,000 - 790 = 210 million calls.

  • At 02:00, the number of API calls is 2,000 * 1 million = 2 billion. The remaining 210 million calls from Tier 1 are used first. The remaining calls are calculated based on the Tier 2 price. The API call fee at 02:00 is 210 * 2.00 + (2,000 - 210) * 1.80 = 3,642.00 CNY.

• Total daily fee = Topic resource usage fee + API call fee = 0 + 1,580.00 + 3,642.00 = 5,222.00 CNY.

Continuous Delivery

The Continuous Delivery component is billed monthly based on the number of users. It uses tiered pricing, and the billing unit is CNY/user/month. When you access this component for the first time, a pop-up window appears to confirm that you want to start using the service. The billing rules are as follows:

Billing example

The following example shows how to calculate the monthly fee:

• If a tenant has 50 users, the monthly fee is 5 * 0.00 + 45 * 100.00 = 4,500 CNY.

• If a tenant has 100 users, the monthly fee is 5 * 0.00 + 45 * 100.00 + 50 * 80.00 = 8,500 CNY.

• If a tenant has 200 users, the monthly fee is 5 * 0.00 + 45 * 100.00 + 50 * 80.00 + 100 * 60.00 = 14,500 CNY.

Data Access Proxy

Data Access Proxy is billed hourly based on the instance type. It uses tiered pricing, and the billing unit is CNY/hour. The billing rules are as follows:

Task Scheduling

The Task Scheduling component is billed based on the number of schedules. It uses tiered pricing based on the total number of monthly schedules, and the billing unit is CNY/10,000 schedules. The billing rules are as follows:

Simple job scheduling billing

Cluster job scheduling billing

Billing example

The following example shows how to calculate the monthly fee for simple job scheduling for a public cloud user:

• For 5 million monthly invocations, the monthly cost is 10 * 0.00 + 490 * 1.60 = 784 CNY.

• If you have 50 million active schedules in a month, the monthly fee is 10 * 0.00 + 990 * 1.60 + 4,000 * 1.28 = 6,704 CNY.

API Gateway

The API Gateway component is billed based on the number of calls. It uses tiered pricing based on the total number of hourly calls, and the billing unit is CNY/10,000 calls. The billing rules are as follows:

Billing example

The following example is for the public cloud:

• If a user makes 600,000 valid API calls in an hour, the fee for that hour is (60 - 10) * 0.2 = 10 CNY.

• If a user makes 15 million valid API calls in an hour, the fee for that hour is (1,000 - 10) * 0.2 + (1,500 - 1,000) * 0.16 = 278 CNY.

Real-time Monitoring Service (RMS)

Pay-as-you-go

Billing example

For example, to calculate the cost of monitoring distributed tracing requests in the China (Hangzhou) region, assume that you monitor an average of 100 pods per day, which generate 10 million requests per day. The monthly cost is calculated as follows:

• Pay-as-you-go in a non-Finance Cloud region: 10 × 0.5 × 30 = 150 CNY

• Pay-as-you-go in a Finance Cloud region: 10 × 1 × 30 = 300 CNY

For more information about RMS billing examples, see Pay-as-you-go and Billing examples.

Billing statements

SOFAStack settles fees on an hourly basis. Alibaba Cloud measures your service usage, generates a bill every 24 hours, and automatically deducts the billed amount from your Alibaba Cloud account balance.

Overdue payments

• If your account has an overdue payment because the balance is insufficient to pay your bill, you cannot access the service or change configurations in the console or using OpenAPI. However, your existing instances remain available for 7 days (168 hours), and billing continues during this period.

• If your account has an overdue payment for 7 days (168 hours) and you have not paid the full amount, Alibaba Cloud stops the service. Your service instances and configurations are released, and the data they contain is deleted and cannot be recovered.

• For user data, code, and configurations in the R&D suite components of this product, if your account has an overdue payment for 7 days, or if the service expires and is not renewed, the service is stopped. Your user data, code, and configurations are retained for 180 days from the date the payment became overdue or the service expired. After this period, Alibaba Cloud deletes all user data, code, and configurations from the component.

Refund policy

Some SOFAStack components support a five-day unconditional refund. You can request a refund for an eligible product if you purchased it within the last five days. Refunds are processed in one of the following two ways:

• For orders paid using a third-party payment method within the last three months, the refund is automatically returned to the original payment source.

• For orders paid from your Alibaba Cloud account balance, or for orders paid using a third-party payment method more than three months ago, the refund is credited to your Alibaba Cloud account balance.

The five-day unconditional refund is currently available for the following product components: Microservice Platform, Message Queue, and Continuous Delivery.

You must meet the following requirements:

• Only the product components listed above are eligible for a five-day unconditional refund.

• The instance must be no more than five days old.

• The instance must not have been used within the five-day period. For example, no resources have been created.

• Each user is limited to one refund for one instance of the Message Queue product component. No refunds are provided beyond this limit.

To request a refund, submit a ticket. When you submit the ticket, select the financial refund category.