A savings plan is a discount plan that provides savings on your Alibaba Cloud usage. A savings plan does not directly provide resources and must be applied to pay-as-you-go resources to provide discounts. If you do not have eligible pay-as-you-go resources after you purchase a savings plan, you are charged the hourly commitment that is associated with the savings plan. To maximize the benefits of savings plans and reduce operational costs, you must be familiar with the deduction rules (offset rules) of savings plans. This topic describes the deduction rules of savings plans and the resources eligible for savings plans. This topic also describes how savings plans are applied.
Deduction rules of savings plans
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You do not need to manually apply savings plans to pay-as-you-go instances.
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After you purchase a savings plan, the savings plan is automatically matched to eligible pay-as-you-go resources during the duration of the savings plan. After a savings plan is matched to pay-as-you-go resources, the savings plan is applied to offset the fees for the resources at the discounted pay-as-you-go rate (also known as the Savings Plan rate) every hour in the order of time when the resources are billed.
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The savings plan can be used to cover your discounted pay-as-you-go resource spend up to the hourly commitment until the plan expires. Any spend beyond the hourly commitment is charged based on regular pay-as-you-go rates.
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If the hourly discounted spend of all your pay-as-you-go resources that are matched to a savings plan does not exceed the hourly commitment associated with the savings plan, the savings plan covers the discounted hourly spend. You are charged only the hourly commitment.
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Savings plan-eligible items
The following table describes the items to which you can apply savings plans. Log on to the Expenses and Costs console, go to the Savings Plan Overview page tab of the Savings Plan page, and then click Configure Offset Rule in the Actions column corresponding to a savings plan. In the dialog box that appears, you can turn on or turn off the switches in the Offset column to enable or disable items eligible for the savings plan and achieve fine-grained management. You can turn on or turn off the switches in the Offset column based on the following table.
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Savings plan-eligible items are not inherently prioritized but benefit from the savings plan in the order of time when the items are billed. If the discounted hourly spend of eligible items exceeds the hourly commitment associated with a savings plan, the eligible items to which the savings plan is applied may vary in the hourly bills. To optimize costs, we recommend that you recalculate the required savings and upgrade the savings plan. For more information, see the Purchase a savings plan based on Alibaba Cloud savings plan recommendations section of the "Purchase a savings plan" topic.
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Take note that after you modify a deduction rule, the modification immediately takes effect. This modification may apply to the bills that are being generated for the current billing cycle due to the delay in bill generation.
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Savings plan-eligible item |
Description |
ECS compute savings plan |
General-purpose savings plan |
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Elastic Compute Service (ECS) - pay-as-you-go |
Instance type |
For pay-as-you-go ECS instances, savings plans can be applied to offset the fees for the instance types. |
Supported |
Supported |
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ECS - pay-as-you-go |
System disk |
For pay-as-you-go ECS instances, savings plans can be applied to offset the fees for block storage devices. |
Supported |
Supported |
|
ECS - pay-as-you-go |
Operating system |
For pay-as-you-go ECS instances, savings plans can be applied to offset the image license fees for non-Alibaba Cloud Market images. |
Supported |
Supported |
|
ECS - pay-as-you-go |
Public bandwidth |
For pay-as-you-go ECS instances, savings plans can be applied to offset the fees for public bandwidth resources that are charged based on pay-by-bandwidth billing method. |
Supported |
Supported |
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Elastic Container Instance |
Instance |
For elastic container instances created based on specific ECS instance types, savings plans can be applied to offset the fees for the instances. |
Supported |
Supported |
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Elastic Container Instance |
vCPU specifications |
For elastic container instances created based on vCPU and memory specifications, savings plans can be applied to offset the fees for the instances. |
Not supported |
Supported |
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Elastic Container Instance |
Memory specifications |
Not supported |
Supported |
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Cloud disk performance |
Performance provision |
For Enterprise SSD (ESSD) AutoPL disks and ESSD PL-X disks for which the performance provision feature is enabled, savings plans can be applied to offset the fees for performance provision. |
Not supported |
Supported |
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Cloud disk |
Data disk |
For cloud disks that are used as data disks, savings plans can be applied to offset the fees for disk capacity. |
Not supported |
Supported |
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Cloud disk performance |
io_burst |
For ESSD AutoPL disks for which the performance burst feature is enabled, savings plans can be applied to offset the fees for performance burst. |
Not supported |
Supported |
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Immediate Capacity Reservation |
Immediate capacity reservation |
For eligible immediate capacity reservations, savings plans can be applied to offset the instance type fees for the immediate capacity reservations. |
Supported |
Supported |
Usage priorities
Discount plans, such as savings plans, reserved instances, and storage capacity units, can be applied to offset fees for pay-as-you-go instances. If you have multiple discount plans, the plans are applied in the following sequence:
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Reserved instances and storage capacity units
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ECS compute savings plans
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General-purpose savings plans
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Coupons
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Vouchers
Savings plans provide cost savings for pay-as-you-go resources and adhere to the following rule: If a pay-as-you-go instance that is provided at a discounted rate is matched to a savings plan and the discounted rate is lower than the Savings Plan rate, the savings plan is applied to the instance and the discounted rate instead of the Savings Plan rate is used to burn down the hourly commitment.
Usage priorities of multiple savings plans
If you use one Alibaba Cloud account to purchase multiple savings plans that provide different discounts, the savings plans are applied based on their expiration times, from the earliest to the latest. If your savings plans have the same expiration time, the savings plans are applied based on their purchase times. For example, if you purchase a three-year All Upfront savings plan and then purchase a one-year Partial Upfront savings plan after one year, the Partial Upfront savings plan expires before the All Upfront savings plan. In this case, the Partial Upfront savings plan is applied before the All Upfront savings plan.
Deduction rule examples
When using savings plans, instances have two billing unit prices: the regular pay-as-you-go unit price (hourly price) and the discounted unit price of the savings plan. Within the deductible amount range of the savings plan, billing and deduction are based on the discounted unit price; beyond the deductible amount range of the savings plan, billing is still based on the regular pay-as-you-go unit price. For specific discount rates, see
General savings plan discount example
For example, you have several pay-as-you-go ecs.g6.xlarge instances in the China (Shanghai) region and purchased a savings plan to optimize costs. The type is general, payment type is all upfront, purchase duration is 3 years, and the hourly committed consumption amount is2 yuan/hour。
The prices in this example are for illustration purposes only. For actual pricing and discount information, see
and
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Assume that the regular pay-as-you-go unit price of ecs.g6.xlarge is1 yuan/instance/hour, the Savings Plan discount for the ecs.g6 instance family in China East 2 (Shanghai) region is45.5% off, then the discounted unit price is1*0.455 = 0.455 yuan/instance/hour. Since the hourly committed consumption amount is2 yuan/hour, this Savings Plan can deduct at most2/0.455 = 4.396 instances of ecs.g6.xlarge pay-as-you-go bills per hour.
The cost comparison calculated at regular pay-as-you-go unit prices and discounted unit prices respectively is shown in the following table.
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Billing Method |
First Hour (Assuming 6 instances running) |
Second Hour (Assuming 5 instances running) |
Third Hour (Assuming 4 instances running) |
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Without Savings Plan, charged at regular pay-as-you-go unit price |
Total cost: 6 * 1 = 6 yuan |
Total cost: 5 * 1 = 5 yuan |
Total cost: 4 * 1 = 4 yuan |
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With Savings Plan, charged at discounted unit price |
Exceeds the maximum deductible instances for the savings plan (4.396 instances), costs are divided as follows:
Total cost: 2 + 1 * (6 - 2 / 0.455) = 3.604 yuan |
Exceeds the maximum deductible instances for the savings plan (4.396 instances), costs are divided as follows:
Total cost: 2 + 1 * (5 - 2 / 0.455) = 2.604 yuan |
Does not reach the maximum deductible instances for the savings plan (4.396 instances), hourly committed consumption can cover all costs. Total cost: 2 yuan |
Multi-account sharing of a single savings plan for deduction
If you are an enterprise user, Alibaba Cloud supports sharing one savings plan across multiple accounts. You can enable the benefit asset sharing feature on the Alibaba Cloud account with the enterprise account center enabled, and share the savings plan to other Alibaba Cloud accounts for use.
Usage restrictions
The following restrictions apply when sharing savings plans across multiple accounts:
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Alibaba Cloud accounts that receive shared savings plans cannot share those same savings plans again.
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A single savings plan can be shared to a maximum of 100 Alibaba Cloud accounts.
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If the shared account has already purchased savings plans, its own savings plans will be used for deduction first.
Enable multi-account sharing of savings plans
Before sharing savings plans, you need to enable the enterprise account center feature and invite other enterprise member accounts to join, forming an enterprise account organization relationship. For detailed operations, see Activate the enterprise multi-account management service.
If you have already enabled the enterprise account center feature, you can enable savings plan cross-account sharing through both manual sharing and automatic sharing methods
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Manual sharing: Specify specific asset IDs for sharing, and you can choose to share to specific accounts or organization nodes. This setting is only effective for that asset ID.
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Automatic sharing: Set automatic sharing rules based on asset types. Newly created assets will be automatically shared to the specified scope according to the rules.
For detailed operation guidance, see Benefit Asset Sharing.