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Community Blog Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan: A New Flexible and Cost-effective Pricing Model

Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan: A New Flexible and Cost-effective Pricing Model

Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan is a discount plan that can be applied to offset the bills of pay-as-you-go instances, excluding preemptible instances.

What is Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan

Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan is a discount plan that allows you to receive pay-as-you-go billing discounts in exchange for a commitment to use a consistent amount (measured in USD/hour) of resources over a one-year or three-year period. After you purchase an Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan, the hourly bills of your pay-as-you-go instances are covered up to the amount of the plan.

When you use an Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan, your pay-as-you-go instances of each instance type have a regular pay-as-you-go unit price and a savings plan unit price. For more information, see the Discount Details page. Resource usage within your commitment is billed based on the savings plan unit price. Resource usage beyond your commitment is billed at the regular pay-as-you-go unit price.

For example, assume that Alex has several ecs.g6.xlarge instances in the China (Shanghai) region and can use a three-year general-purpose savings plan to obtain the following discounts.

Assume that the regular pay-as-you-go unit price of ecs.g6.xlarge instances is USD 0.155/instance/hour and a three-year savings plan provides savings of 54.5% off the pay-as-you-go price for the ecs.g6 instance family in the China (Shanghai) region. The savings plan unit price of the ecs.g6.xlarge instances is calculated based on the following formula: USD 0.155/instance/hour × 0.455 = USD 0.0705/instance/hour.

If Alex makes a commitment of USD 0.31/hour, the savings plan can be applied to offset hourly bills of 4.397 pay-as-you-go ecs.g6.xlarge instances, which is calculated based on the following formula: 0.31/0.0705 = 4.397.

The Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan Types

The Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan are available in two types: general-purpose and ECS compute. The following table compares the two types of savings plans. ECS compute savings plans are less flexible but offer higher discounts than general-purpose savings plans.

General-purpose Savings Plan Types

  • Can be used across services and supports the following services and resources:
    ECS: instance computing resources (vCPUs and memory), system disks, and public bandwidth

Elastic Container Instance (ECI): instance computing resources (vCPUs and memory)

  • Has no limits on regions.
  • Has no limits on instance families, instance sizes, or operating systems.

ECS Compute Savings Plan Types

  • Can be used for only the following ECS resources: instance computing resources (vCPUs and memory), system disks, and public bandwidth.
  • Can be applied only within a single region.
  • Can be applied only to specific instance families. You can choose to place an order by instance family set. In this case, this savings plan type can be applied to all instance families in the set. You can also place an order by instance family. In this case, this savings plan type can be applied only to the specified instance family. Has no limits on instance sizes or operating systems.

How to Purchase And Apply Alibaba Cloud Savings Plans

Select a Savings Plan Type

Choose between general-purpose (high flexibility) and
ECS compute (offers higher billing discounts but requires regions and instance families to be selected.)

Make an Hourly Commitment

Specify an hourly commitment. If you have instances running, the system recommends a suitable hourly commitment based on your past consumption trends.

Select a Payment Option and Duration

Select a payment option (All Upfront/Partial Upfront/No Upfront) and payment duration (one year/three years)

Payment and Activation

Savings plans are automatically applied to offset the bills of pay-as-you-go instances in real-time without any further operations.

Manage Savings Plans

Savings plans can be monitored and managed in real-time in the Alibaba Cloud Management Console.

Conclusion

Alibaba Cloud Savings Plans offer pay-as-you-go billing discounts and help achieve flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency improvement.

Related Products

ECS Savings Plans

Savings plans are a new pricing model that can reduce the costs of pay-as-you-go instances by up to 76%.
This pricing model offers a lower price for pay-as-you-go ECS and ECI instances. Savings plans do not have any limits on the regions, instance families, sizes, or operating systems of instances. Savings plans make it simple and efficient for you to deploy your business while further reducing usage costs.

Savings Plans Calculator

Check out how much you can save on this plan.

Related Blog

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Alibaba Cloud Savings Plans: Cost Optimization Provided by Cloud-Native

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