Billing methods

Billing method

Description

Subscription

• An upfront payment method. You pay for the instance when you purchase it.

• Subscription instances can be changed to pay-as-you-go instances. For more information, see Change the billing method from subscription to pay-as-you-go.

• Suitable for long-term use. Subscription is more cost-effective than pay-as-you-go, and longer subscription periods offer greater discounts.

Pay-as-you-go

• A pay-after-use method. A bill is generated each hour and fees are deducted from your Alibaba Cloud account based on the instance type and the peak storage capacity at the time of billing.

  Note

  ApsaraDB for MongoDB offers storage plans and compute plans that can offset the storage and instance type costs for pay-as-you-go replica set instances. For more information, see Storage plans and Compute plans.

  • The billing cycle is 1 hour. Usage of less than 1 hour is billed as 1 hour.

  • If you change the storage capacity within a billing cycle, you are charged based on the peak storage capacity during that cycle.

    Example:

    During the 01:00:00 to 02:00:00 (UTC+8) billing cycle, if the storage capacity is 1 GB at 01:10:00, changed to 8 GB at 01:20:00, and then changed to 2 GB at 01:50:00, you are charged for 8 GB for this billing cycle.

  • Bills are typically generated within 1 hour after a billing cycle ends, and no later than 3 hours. The actual time is subject to the system.

    Example:

    The bill for the 09:00:00 to 10:00:00 (UTC+8) billing cycle is generated before 11:00:00.

  Important

  The billing cycle and invoice cycle for backup storage are different from those for instance types and storage capacity. Backup storage is billed and invoiced on a daily basis.

• Pay-as-you-go instances can be changed to subscription instances. For more information, see Change from pay-as-you-go to subscription.

• Suitable for short-term use. You can release instances when they are no longer needed to reduce costs. For more information, see Release an instance.

  Important

  After a pay-as-you-go instance is released, you are no longer charged for it.