Storage space billing rules

Notes

• Storage plans are available in two types: Chinese Mainland and Outside Chinese Mainland. A storage plan is shared by all PolarDB clusters in the regions that are covered by the plan's type.

• If your storage plan capacity is insufficient, you can purchase additional storage plans or . Downgrading the specifications of a purchased storage plan is not supported.

• Storage usage that exceeds your storage plan capacity is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.

  For example, you have three PolarDB clusters, each with 400 GB of storage. These three clusters can share a 1000 GB storage plan. The excess 200 GB is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. For more information, see .

Advantages

• The Pay-by-capacity (pay-as-you-go) + Storage plan billing method combines the low cost of a subscription with the flexibility of pay-as-you-go.

  • The pay-by-capacity model is serverless. You do not need to specify a capacity at the time of purchase. Storage automatically scales as your data grows, and you are charged only for the storage that you use.

  • The Pay-by-capacity (pay-as-you-go) + Storage plan method is cheaper than standard pay-as-you-go. You receive discounts based on the capacity and duration of your storage plan, with savings of up to 45% compared to standard pay-as-you-go storage rates.

• Storage plans offer broad coverage and are not limited to a single cluster. A storage plan covers the total storage usage of all clusters under your Alibaba Cloud account within the applicable regions:

  • A Universal for the Chinese mainland storage plan covers the total storage usage of all clusters under your Alibaba Cloud account in all regions within the Chinese mainland.

  • A Universal for Hong Kong (China) and regions outside China storage plan covers the total storage usage of clusters under your Alibaba Cloud account in the following regions: China (Hong Kong), Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, US (Silicon Valley), US (Virginia), Japan (Tokyo), Germany (Frankfurt), and UK (London).

  Note

  Storage plans can be used only to offset costs for pay-by-capacity (pay-as-you-go) storage. They cannot be applied to subscription storage.

• If your storage usage exceeds the capacity of your storage plan, you can still write data. The excess usage is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Scenarios

• This method is ideal if you have clusters under your Alibaba Cloud account that store a large amount of data in a specific region. If you require a large data volume, such as 1000 GB or more, on a subscription basis is more cost-effective than the pay-as-you-go billing method. The larger the capacity of the storage plan, the greater the discount.

• Your business workload fluctuates frequently.

• You have multiple pay-as-you-go clusters.

Price list