Billing FAQs

Overdue payment and service suspension policy

Machine Translation on the Alibaba Cloud China site is billed hourly. If a payment is overdue, the service is suspended immediately, and the platform releases the associated resources after 15 days. To ensure service continuity, we offer a payment grace period that you can enable manually. For more information, view the details.

Checking resource pack balance

1. In the Alibaba Cloud User Center, go to Resource Management. Here you can find information about your resource pack, including Resource Pack Name, Deduction Time, Remaining Amount Before Deduction, Deduction Amount, Remaining Amount After Deduction, and Deduction Instance ID.

On the Resource Management page, set the resource dimension to resource pack and click the usage details tab. To find a specific resource pack, filter by instance name and click Export to download the detailed data.

2. You can also view your resource pack balance directly in the Machine Translation console under Service Activation (Note: Data is typically delayed by about one hour.)

Select the tab for the corresponding translation type, such as Image Translation. In the usage quota column, you can view the remaining and total amounts for your free tier and resource pack, displayed in the "Remaining/Total" format.

Setting up resource pack quota alerts

1. Go to Resource Management in the Alibaba Cloud User Center and click Set Quota Alert.

2. You can set alerts in bulk or individually for each resource pack.

a. Batch settings

In the Set Quota Alert dialog box, enable the Unified Quota Alert Settings switch. Select an alert threshold, such as 20%, from the Batch Set Remaining Quota Ratio drop-down list. This ratio will be applied to all your resource packs. Click OK to save the settings.

b. Settings for individual resource packs

Checking free tier balance

You can view your free tier balance directly in the Machine Translation console under Service Activation (Note: Data is typically delayed by about one hour.)

Select the tab for the corresponding translation type, such as Image Translation. In the usage quota column, you can view the remaining and total amounts for your free tier, displayed in the "Remaining/Total" format.

Requesting an invoice

Yes, you can request an invoice from the Invoices page in the Alibaba Cloud User Center. Alibaba Cloud offers self-service invoicing. The invoice is issued by Alibaba Cloud Computing Co., Ltd. The invoice lists the line item as "Software Service."

On the Invoices page, in the Invoicing History section, click Request Invoice.

Incorrect resource pack purchase

Once you purchase a resource pack, it cannot be modified or exchanged. You can request a refund and then purchase the correct one.

Refunding a resource pack

1. You can receive a full refund for an unused resource pack within 5 days of purchase through our self-service process.

2. If you have used the resource pack, you can request a manual refund within 5 days of purchase. The refund amount will be prorated based on the remaining balance of the pack.

For more details, please refer to the Refund policy.

Character counting for Text Translation

The character count is based on the length of the source text. This count includes punctuation, spaces, and HTML tags. Each Chinese character, English letter, or punctuation mark counts as one character. For example:

Language	Source text	Character count
Chinese	The weather is nice today!	8

Image Translation billing

For the Image Translation API, we charge for each successful request that returns rendered data. Failed requests are not billed.

Document Translation billing

The following table details the billing rules.

Format	Billing rule	Description
ppt, pptx, pdf	Per-page billing
doc, docx, xls, xlsx, csv, html, htm, xml, xhtml, txt, srt, json, xliff, tmx, dita, md, markdown, idml	Billed as 1 page for every 2,000 characters	HTML, JavaScript (JS), and CSS code within the document are not charged. Each Chinese character, English letter, punctuation mark, and space counts as one character.

Billing for asynchronous Image Translation

We bill based on the number of images processed.