Billing

Billing types

The system makes deductions in the following order: free quota > dedicated resource plan > shared resource plan > pay-as-you-go.

When your free quota is used up, the system prioritizes valid resource plans with remaining quotas for deductions. After all resource plans are exhausted, any subsequent calls are automatically billed using the pay-as-you-go method.

Free quota

After you activate the OCR service, you receive a specific quota of free calls. You can use these calls to evaluate OCR performance and for integration testing. The system always uses the free quota first for any API calls.

• Recognition APIs: Each API comes with 200 free calls per month.

• Verification APIs: Each account receives a one-time total of 50 free calls.

Resource plans (subscription)

After you activate the OCR service, you can purchase subscription-based resource plans. When an API call is made, the system automatically deducts the corresponding number of calls or points from your purchased resource plans.

There are two types of subscription resource plans:

• Shared resource plan: This resource plan can be used by multiple APIs. It is recommended to purchase shared resource plans first.

• Dedicated resource plan: This resource plan can only be used by a specific API.

Note:

• The unified OCR service, a single API that can recognize 59 types of credentials and materials, supports only shared resource plans, not dedicated resource plans.

• Subscription resource plans are more cost-effective than the pay-as-you-go method. To reduce costs, purchase subscription resource plans in advance.

• Resource plans are valid for one year after purchase. Purchase plans as needed.

Pay-as-you-go

After you activate the OCR service, the pay-as-you-go billing method is enabled by default.

• If you make API calls after your free quota and resource plans are exhausted, the system automatically deducts fees from your Alibaba Cloud account based on the following formula: Actual successful calls × Pay-as-you-go unit price.

• The pay-as-you-go unit price uses tiered pricing. This means that the higher the total number of calls in a calendar month, the lower the unit price. For more information, see Pay-as-you-go.

  Important

  • When you activate the OCR service, the pay-as-you-go mode is automatically enabled and cannot be disabled. This ensures that your service runs smoothly. You must ensure that your Alibaba Cloud account balance is sufficient to avoid service disruptions due to overdue payments.

  • Pay-as-you-go charges are not incurred if no successful calls are made, or if the number of calls does not exceed the free quota and the remaining quota in your resource plans.

• The system generates a pay-as-you-go bill for the previous month on the first day of each month. You can view the billing details on the bill.

QPS add-on packages

After you activate the OCR service, a default concurrency of 10 QPS is provided for each API. If this concurrency does not meet your business needs, you can purchase QPS add-on packages to scale out.

Note:

• For ID Card Recognition, Full-text Recognition (High-definition), and General Text Recognition, you can activate them by direct purchase.

• For other APIs, you can contact the official DingTalk group [35208328] to submit your request.

Resource Plan (Subscription)

Assume that a user purchased a dedicated resource plan of 1,000 calls for a specific API. The user makes 5,000 calls to the API in a month, and the API provides a free quota of 200 calls.

• First, the 200 free calls for the month are deducted. This leaves 4,800 billable calls.

• Next, 1,000 calls are offset by the dedicated resource plan, which exhausts the plan. This leaves 3,800 calls to be billed.

• Finally, the remaining 3,800 calls are billed using the pay-as-you-go method.

Pay-as-you-go

A user makes a total of 120,200 calls to the ID Card Recognition service within a month. After the 200 free calls are deducted, 120,000 calls are billable and require payment. The cost is calculated as follows:

Therefore, the total cost for calling this API in the month is 200 × 0 + 10,000 × 0.0825 + 90,000 × 0.0495 + 20,000 × 0.0415 = CNY 6,110