A savings plan is a discount model that helps you reduce costs on pay-as-you-go resources. It applies to your bills for pay-as-you-go Elastic Compute Service (ECS) or Elastic Container Instance (ECI) usage, excluding spot instances. By properly configuring a savings plan, you can enjoy lower prices while maintaining the flexibility to change your resources. This topic explains how to understand, purchase, use, and manage savings plans.
Overview
A savings plan is a discount model that applies to the costs of pay-as-you-go resources, specifically ECS and ECI instances (excluding spot instances). By committing to a consistent hourly spend commitment for a one-year or three-year term, or five-year term, you receive a lower price on your resource usage compared to standard pay-as-you-go rates. Unlike a reserved instance, which is also a discount model, a savings plan provides greater flexibility, letting you change instance types, instance families, regions, and operating systems.
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If you use pay-as-you-go resources for an extended period, you can purchase a savings plan to receive significant discounts and reduce your overall costs.
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If you currently use the subscription model, switching to pay-as-you-go and using a savings plan can increase your flexibility. You can change the instance type, instance family, or region of your resources as your business needs change, without incurring additional fees.
A savings plan is a billing discount and does not affect the state of your resources. Purchasing a savings plan without any running instances does not provision resources. To save money, you must use the plan with active pay-as-you-go instances. With the right savings plan, you can reduce your resource costs by up to 83% compared to pay-as-you-go rates.
Savings plans vs. other models
Alibaba Cloud offers two types of savings plans to match your desired level of flexibility: ECS compute savings plan and general-purpose savings plan. The following figure compares savings plans with other long-term pricing models.
How it works
A savings plan does not directly provision resources. It is a discount applied to your existing pay-as-you-go resources. If you primarily use the pay-as-you-go model, purchasing a suitable savings plan can optimize your costs. As shown in the figure, once you purchase a savings plan, Alibaba Cloud charges you based on your hourly spend commitment. While active, the savings plan automatically applies to eligible resource usage. Each hour, the covered usage is billed at the discounted savings plan rate. Any usage that exceeds your hourly spend commitment is billed at the standard pay-as-you-go rate. For detailed rules, see Eligible items and deduction rules for savings plans.
If your usage in an hour falls below your hourly spend commitment, you are still billed for the full commitment amount. Therefore, a careful pre-purchase estimation is essential for effective cost management. Alibaba Cloud provides purchase recommendations to help you. For more information, see Purchase a savings plan.
Use cases
Before you purchase a savings plan, consider your business characteristics, resource costs, and billing management needs to determine if a savings plan is the right fit for you.
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Business characteristics
With its consistent hourly spend commitment, a savings plan is ideal for workloads with stable resource demand. If your business requires flexibility and fits one of the following models, you can use a savings plan to cover the stable portion of your usage and rely on the pay-as-you-go model for demand spikes. This approach helps reduce operational costs. For steadily growing workloads, you can start with a lower commitment and upgrade your savings plan as your needs evolve, simplifying financial management.
Correlated workloads
Different services are interconnected, and a traffic increase in one service leads to a simultaneous increase in resource demand across others.
Advantage: Compared to a mix of subscription and pay-as-you-go, this approach offers even greater flexibility. All resources are managed on a pay-as-you-go basis, eliminating the need for batch maintenance and simplifying lifecycle management. You can adjust resources at any time with simple budgeting and no need for capacity forecasting.
Mixed-workload environments
Multiple online services have different resource demands at different times.
Advantage: Optimal cost-effectiveness. Avoids extra fees from upgrading, downgrading, or refunding subscription instances. All resources are managed on a pay-as-you-go basis, simplifying maintenance and budgeting without capacity forecasting.
Steady-state workloads
Your business has relatively stable and predictable resource demands over time.
Advantage: All resources are managed on a pay-as-you-go basis, simplifying maintenance and lifecycle management. You can change resource configurations at any time with simple budgeting and no capacity forecasting.
Phased-growth workloads
Your overall workload grows steadily, with periods of relatively stable resource demand.
Advantage: For continuous growth, you can stack or upgrade savings plans to support expansion. This approach reduces operational costs while simplifying financial management.
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Usage costs
If your business requires frequent resource changes but you want to maintain stable cloud costs, a savings plan can help reduce the risk of unexpected expenses.
Need to change resources
Changing the configuration or region of a subscription instance before it expires can result in additional fees, which may cause you to exceed your budget.
While the pay-as-you-go model does not charge extra for instance changes, it can significantly increase your overall costs.
By combining the pay-as-you-go model with a savings plan, you can reduce change-related expenses, receive discounts, and maintain stable, long-term costs. The figure below illustrates how overall costs change with common resource modifications.
Need to change resource types
If your workload has peaks and troughs, and different instance types have non-overlapping load curves, the subscription model can be inefficient. Idle resources increase the unit cost of usage, raising your total cost.
Using a savings plan to cover your pay-as-you-go usage allows you to benefit from discounts that apply across instance families, significantly lowering your total cost.
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Budget and cost management
Both subscription and pay-as-you-go models bill at the individual instance level, which can complicate cloud budget management. A savings plan applies discounts regardless of the instance type or operating system, allowing for flexible changes and simplifying your budgeting process.
Estimate and purchase
Before purchasing a savings plan, evaluate your business needs. You can follow the recommendations provided by Alibaba Cloud in Purchase a savings plan, or perform a manual estimation before proceeding to the purchase page. When estimating manually, consider factors such as your budget, payment option, and resource usage duration to determine the appropriate savings plan discount. After you determine the plan type, instance type, hourly spend commitment, and term, go to the savings plan buy page to configure and place your order.
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To upgrade your savings plan, see Upgrade your current savings plan.
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On the purchase page, adjusting options other than the hourly spend commitment and term does not affect your total payment amount. It only affects the amount of actual resource usage that your savings plan can cover per hour. We strongly recommend that you follow the purchase recommendations or perform a manual estimation before you place your order. If you have other discounts, the final payment price prevails.
Limitations
The following limitations apply to the purchase and use of savings plans:
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Purchase limitations
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Each Alibaba Cloud account can purchase a maximum of 200 savings plans.
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Usage limitations
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Savings plans can only be applied to pay-as-you-go ECS and ECI instances, excluding spot instances. For more information about eligible items and deduction rules, see Eligible items and deduction rules for savings plans.
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For ECS instances, a savings plan can be applied to the costs of computing resources (vCPUs and memory), images, system disks, data disks (including capacity fees, provisioned performance fees, and burst performance fees), and fixed public bandwidth. For more information about ECS instance billing, see Billing overview.
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For ECI instances without a specified instance type, a savings plan can only be applied to the costs of computing resources (vCPUs and memory). For more information about ECI instance billing, see ECI instance billing.
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Lifecycle
Effective time and impact
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Immediate Activation: The savings plan becomes effective and starts applying discounts at the top of the hour when you complete the payment (for example, at HH:00:00).
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Scheduled Activation: You can schedule the plan to activate at a specific hour up to one year in the future. The plan becomes effective and starts applying discounts at the beginning of the specified hour.
For example, if you purchase a one-year savings plan with immediate activation at 13:45 on October 29, 2024, the plan becomes effective at 13:00 on October 29, 2024, and expires at 13:00 on October 29, 2025. If you have eligible pay-as-you-go instances running, discounts are applied to your bill for the 13:00-14:00 hour on October 29, 2024, and continue until the plan expires.
Expiration and impact
You can find the expiration time of your savings plans by searching in the savings plan list in the Expenses and Costs console.
A savings plan expires at the end of its term. After expiration, the discount no longer applies, and your instances will be billed at the standard pay-as-you-go rate. The expiration does not affect the running state of your instances or your business operations.
Suspension for overdue payments
If you choose the Partial Upfront or No Upfront payment option and your account has an overdue balance that prevents the hourly commitment payment, the savings plan is immediately suspended (this rule does not apply if you are eligible for the service suspension protection program. For more information, see Service Suspension Protection). While suspended, the plan stops applying discounts to your pay-as-you-go bills starting from the next hour. The plan resumes applying discounts immediately after you settle the overdue payment.
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If a savings plan is frequently or permanently suspended due to overdue payments, your eligibility for the No Upfront payment option on future Alibaba Cloud products may be affected. Please ensure your account has a sufficient balance.
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Even while a savings plan is suspended, you are still billed for the hourly spend commitment.
View bills
You can view detailed billing information for your savings plans in the Alibaba Cloud Expenses and Costs console.
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Log on to the Expenses and Costs console. In the navigation pane on the left, choose Bills > Bill Details.
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In the list of bill details, add a filter where Product Name is Saving Plan, set other filters as needed, and export the data. For detailed instructions, see Check savings plan bills.
By default, bills for the logon account are displayed. If you log on as the main finance account, you can also filter by account to view data for finance-managed member accounts, and use the Owner account to distinguish finance-managed sub-accounts.
Canceling savings plans
Starting April 3, 2026, Alibaba Cloud allows self-service unsubscription for Savings Plans under the following conditions:
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Condition |
Description |
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Eligible types |
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Payment type limits |
Self-service unsubscription is only available for All Upfront Savings Plans. This option is not supported for the Partial Upfront and No Upfront payment types. |
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Not eligible |
Savings Plans to which discounts have already been applied are not eligible for self-service unsubscription. |
For more information, see the Savings Plan self-service unsubscription announcement.
Renewing savings plans
Before a savings plan expires, you can renew it to extend its term. You can renew a savings plan from the Overview console or go to the Expenses and Costs center and follow the Renew expiring resources guide to configure the renewal.
Manual renewal is only available for the same term as the original order. For example, if the original purchase term was one year, you can only renew for one year.
Monitor and optimize savings plan usage
We recommend that you regularly monitor the usage of your purchased savings plans and adjust their configuration as your business changes to achieve optimal cost-effectiveness. Alibaba Cloud provides utilization and coverage reports. You can use these reports along with the guidance in Query and optimize savings plan usage or the recommendations on the Recommended page to optimize your savings plans.
FAQ
If you have other questions about savings plans, see the Billing FAQ.