Billing

Billing method

API Gateway uses a pay-as-you-go billing method, where charges are based on the number of API calls. The pricing is tiered based on the total number of valid API calls made within a calendar month. No other fees apply.

Billing rules

The gateway is billed hourly. Tiered pricing is applied based on the number of calls made within each hour. Your bill is updated every hour with the charges from the previous hour. On the first day of each calendar month, the call count is reset to zero, and billing restarts.

The tiered pricing is shown in the following table:

Billing example

The following example uses the public cloud:

• User A makes 90,000 valid API calls between 00:00 and 01:00 on the first day of a month. At 01:00, the bill shows CNY 0 because the first 100,000 calls are free.

• User B makes 90,000 valid API calls between 00:00 and 01:00 on the first day of a month. Between 01:00 and 02:00, User B makes another 510,000 valid calls, bringing the cumulative total to 600,000. At 02:00, the bill shows a charge of CNY 10.

  Later, between 23:00 and 24:00 on the 31st of the month, User B makes another 15 million valid API calls. The charge for this period is CNY 278. At 24:00, the total bill for the month is `CNY 10 + CNY 278 = CNY 288`.

  Note

  Because User B did not make any API calls between 02:00 on the 1st and 23:00 on the 31st of the month, no charges were added to the bill during this period.

Payment details

• Billing time: Bills are typically generated within one hour after a billing cycle ends. The bill is updated hourly with charges from the previous hour.

• Payment method: After a bill is generated, the fee is automatically deducted from your Alibaba Cloud account balance. If your account balance is insufficient to pay the bill, your account will have an overdue payment.

• Billing currency: CNY