Pay-by-ingested-data

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By default, SLS uses pay-as-you-go billing, charging by ingested raw data volume. Data stored within 30 days and features such as data transformation and shipping are free. Additional charges apply only for storage beyond 30 days or Internet read traffic.

Billing overview

Pay-as-you-go lets you use resources before you pay for them. You are charged based on actual resource consumption. Bills are generated and deducted from your Alibaba Cloud account balance at the end of each billing cycle.

Item

Description

Billable item

Billable items for this mode:

Billing cycle

SLS bills daily. A bill is generated at 00:00 for the previous day's usage and deducted from your Alibaba Cloud account balance.

Important

If your account balance plus vouchers is less than the payable amount, you receive a notification by text message or email.

Pricing

Current rates are listed on the Pricing of Simple Log Service page.

Scenario

This billing mode suits the following scenarios:

  • Your resource usage frequently fluctuates.

  • Your resource usage is temporary and sudden.

  • You need long-term data storage, data query and analysis, data cleansing and standardization, visualization, monitoring and alerting, and data shipping.

Limits

This billing mode has the following limits, detailed in Limits on a LogStore.

  • This billing model applies at the LogStore level.

  • Metricstore and Query LogStore do not support this billing model.

Billing examples

  • Example 1

    Customer A ingests 10 TB/day, retains data for 30 days, and uses data transformation, query and analysis, Scheduled SQL, intelligent alerting, and data shipping.

    Billable item

    Description

    Daily amount

    Unit price

    Daily fee

    Ingested raw data volume

    10 TB ingested per day.

    10 TB

    CNY 0.4 per GB

    CNY 4,000

    Log storage

    Retention: 30 days.

    Free for the first 30 days under this billing mode.

    • Hot storage: CNY 0.0115 per GB/day

    • Infrequent access (IA) storage: CNY 0.005 per GB/day

    CNY 0

  • Example 2

    Customer B ingests 10 TB/day with a 2:1 compression ratio, retains data for 31 days, and uses data transformation, query and analysis, Scheduled SQL, intelligent alerting, and data shipping. Data stored beyond 30 days moves to the IA storage tier.

    Billable item

    Description

    Daily amount

    Unit price

    Daily fee

    Ingested raw data volume

    10 TB ingested per day.

    10 TB

    CNY 0.4 per GB

    CNY 4,000

    Log storage

    Retention: 31 days. 5 TB stored.

    Free for the first 30 days under this billing mode.

    On day 31, the 5 TB moved to IA storage is charged.

    Infrequent access (IA) storage: CNY 0.005 per GB/day

    CNY 25.6

FAQ

How are storage fees calculated while data accumulates under a long retention period?

Under pay-by-ingested-data, when you configure a long retention period such as 180 days, data accumulates throughout the retention period. Storage fees are calculated dynamically from the actual data volume written each day, not from the eventual stable data volume.

A stable daily storage fee applies only after the storage duration reaches the configured maximum retention period and the data volume stabilizes. Do not estimate accumulation-period costs by multiplying the remaining days by the stable daily fee. Instead, account for the storage cost of the data volume actually written each day.

Does SQL Enhancement mode incur a separate charge, and how is OCU consumption billed?

SQL Enhancement mode does not incur a separate feature fee. However, queries in this mode consume OCU (Open Computing Unit) compute resources, billed at CNY 0.15 per OCU-hour. Charges are calculated in real time based on the actual compute consumption of each query.

OCU consumption varies with query complexity, scanned data volume, and concurrency. To estimate costs, review the usage details or consumption records of the relevant project in the Simple Log Service console. Use a representative interval, such as the previous 7 days, to estimate expected OCU consumption.