Billing overview

Billing mode

Description

VCU mode (formerly reserved mode)

You can purchase reserved VCUs in advance based on resource evaluation results, or enable elastic capacity and pay for consumed computing performance on a pay-as-you-go basis. You can use reserved VCUs and elastic capacity together to save costs.

• When you purchase reserved VCUs, you must pay for compute resources in advance. Tablestore provides fixed computing power based on the purchased reserved VCUs. The unit is VCU.

• After you enable elastic capacity for an instance, the instance enters Serverless mode. You can pay for consumed computing performance based on actual usage without purchasing compute resources in advance.

This mode helps you save on compute resource costs. This mode also lets you control overall resource usage by configuring an upper limit for elastic capacity or disabling elastic capacity. This prevents extra fees caused by unusual traffic. This makes it a better choice for scenarios that require cost control.

Billable items include computing power, data storage, cross-region replication traffic, and outbound public traffic, where data storage includes high-performance storage, Capacity storage, and search index storage. For more information, see VCU mode (formerly Reserved mode).

CU mode (formerly pay-as-you-go mode)

You are charged for resources such as real-time read/write throughput and storage space. You do not need to plan hardware resource consumption in advance.

This mode is suitable for scenarios where workloads fluctuate significantly and unpredictably. The elastic capacity provided by CU mode (formerly pay-as-you-go mode) ensures that your application can handle traffic bursts. This makes it a better choice for scenarios that require high service stability.

Billable items include read throughput, write throughput, data storage, cross-region replication traffic, and outbound public network traffic. For more information, see CU mode (formerly Pay-As-You-Go mode).

Billing method

Description

Subscription

• This is a subscription method. Tablestore provides fixed computing power based on the compute resources that you purchase.

• VCU mode supports reserved VCUs. If you configure reserved VCUs, you are charged based on the number of VCUs. One VCU provides the computing power of a 4-core 16 GB instance.

• VCU mode also supports elastic capacity. After you enable elastic capacity, resources are automatically scaled in increments of 0.1 VCU. You are charged for the scaled resources on an hourly pay-as-you-go basis.

Pay-as-you-go

• This is a pay-as-you-go method. Billing starts after you create a table.

• You are charged on an hourly basis.

Resource plan

• This is a subscription method. You can purchase resource plans for data storage, pay-as-you-go read throughput, and pay-as-you-go write throughput in advance.

• When you are billed for an instance, the fees are first deducted from the resource plan of the same specifications in the same region under your Alibaba Cloud account. You are charged for the excess usage on a pay-as-you-go basis.