Billing method optimization

Alibaba Cloud offers flexible billing methods to help enterprises reduce cloud costs while maintaining security and elasticity. Billing method optimization lets you obtain better discounts without changing resource performance or quantity. Options include discount commitments, deductible resources, and spot instances.

Combine pay-as-you-go with savings plans to save costs

If your company uses pay-as-you-go instances and wants to optimize costs, you can purchase an Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan to cover the bills for these instances. You can use the Savings Plan Purchase Recommendation tool to view estimated savings and recommended purchase plans. To obtain more favorable discounts and flexible payment methods, your company must commit to a specific amount of hourly spending for a 1-year or 3-year term.

1. Savings plans can be used with pay-as-you-go instances, and their instance types can be flexibly upgraded or downgraded.

2. Usage within your hourly commitment is billed at a discounted price. Only usage that exceeds the hourly commitment is charged at the regular pay-as-you-go rate.

3. Flexible payment methods are available. All upfront, partial upfront, and no upfront payment models are supported to ease cash flow pressure.

4. You receive clear invoices for all charges, which simplifies financial management.

Replace pay-as-you-go instances with spot instances

If your business uses pay-as-you-go instances, consider replacing some computing power with spot instances. Spot instances are on-demand instances that offer a significant discount over regular pay-as-you-go pricing. They have fluctuating prices and support per-second billing. By purchasing at the right time, you can lower computing costs and increase business throughput.

Keep the following points in mind when you use spot instances:

• The market price of a spot instance fluctuates based on the supply and demand for a specific instance type. A spot instance is created only if the real-time market price for the specified instance type is lower than your bid and there is sufficient inventory.

• Spot instances have a protection period. During this period, the instance is billed at the market price that was active at the time of purchase. After the protection period ends, the instance is billed at the real-time market price.

Spot instances are ideal for stateless and fault-tolerant workloads. You can also use auto provisioning to deploy an instance cluster across different billing methods, zones, and instance types with a single click, delivering stable computing power while reducing costs.

Optimize cloud traffic costs

Traffic cost optimization reduces the costs from network products that carry east-west and north-south traffic, including Elastic IP Address (EIP) and Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN). These products typically support pay-as-you-go and pay-by-data-transfer billing. To optimize costs, purchase data transfer plans for lower rates or use Alibaba Cloud traffic cost tools for flexible tiered pricing.

You can manage costs from traffic products by activating Cloud Data Transfer (CDT). After you activate CDT, you only need to manage traffic costs within the single CDT product. Compared to a fixed-price model, CDT supports a tiered pricing model where the unit price decreases as your usage increases, making it more cost-effective. CDT currently supports traffic products such as Elastic IP Address, CEN, and VPC Peering.

In Network Billing Method Optimization, you can view the potential cost savings from switching to CDT. These savings are calculated based on your historical usage data and optimization algorithms.

CDT consolidates your total usage and costs into a single bill, making it easy to track overall spending.

You can control cloud traffic costs by combining resource plans with tiered pricing. The consumption amount calculated by CDT is the final payable amount after deductions from data transfer plans are applied.

Use resource plans and other deduction resources to lower pay-as-you-go costs

Deduction plans (DPs) offset pay-as-you-go resource usage at a lower unit price. DPs include reserved instances, storage capacity units (SCUs), PolarDB compute plans, and resource plans. You can manage DPs in Resource Management - Resource Instance Management, where you can view Instance Summary, Usage Details, and Coverage Overview reports. To maximize coverage and minimize pay-as-you-go costs, subscribe to resource plan specifications based on your actual usage.

Save on storage costs with RC

If your business has significant storage needs for scenarios such as internet audio and video, cloud photo albums, or data backups, consider OSS Reserved Capacity (RC). A one-year reserved capacity saves up to 70% on storage fees compared to pay-as-you-go. RC offers region-specific and region-agnostic options. Region-agnostic reserved capacity suits customers without specific region requirements who can accept public-internet-only access, and provides greater discounts than region-specific capacity at the same tier.

Region-specific reserved capacity offsets the storage fees for Standard - Locally Redundant Storage in that region for a one-year term. Compared to the pay-as-you-go model, you can save up to 50% on fees. It offers seven capacity tiers ranging from 500 GB to 1 PB. The larger the capacity you purchase, the lower the unit storage cost.

Region-agnostic reserved capacity creates an Anywhere Bucket and can offset the storage fees for that bucket for a one-year term. An Anywhere Bucket supports data access only over the public internet and does not support access over a private network. Compared to the pay-as-you-go model, you can save up to 70% on fees. It offers four capacity tiers ranging from 10 TB to 1 PB. The larger the capacity you purchase, the lower the unit storage cost.

Keep track of the latest discounts and billing methods

Alibaba Cloud continuously monitors the cloud needs of business applications and provides fine-grained instances and cost-effective billing methods for different business scenarios. We recommend tracking the latest discounts, product upgrades, and new or upgraded tools. For example, CDT cost optimization suggestions will gradually expand to support more cloud products, helping you further manage traffic costs.