A savings plan is a discount plan that provides savings for pay-as-you-go Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, except for preemptible instances. A combination of savings plans and pay-as-you-go instances provides more flexibility than subscription instances or a combination of reserved instances and pay-as-you-go instances. This topic describes the benefits, scenarios, types, application rules, lifecycles, and deduction rules of savings plans.
Benefits
Flexible use of pay-as-you-go resources: You can benefit from the savings provided by savings plans only if the savings plans match pay-as-you-go instances, except for preemptible instances.
Cost-effectiveness: Savings plans provide significant savings compared with pay-as-you-go pricing in exchange for a one-, three-, or five-year usage commitment. The discounted pay-as-you-go rates, known as Savings Plan rates, are approximately the same as equivalent subscription rates.
Flexible payment options: The following payment options are available for savings plans: All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront.
Deductibility: When you apply a savings plan, the hourly bills for resource usage are discounted and offset by the hourly commitment amount and usage beyond the commitment is charged based on the pay-as-you-go rates.
Scenarios
Savings plans can be applied to offset fees for pay-as-you-go instances. The following table describes the scenarios in which you can apply savings plans to save on your pay-as-you-go instance usage.
Scenario | Savings plans applied to pay-as-you-go instances |
When you use subscription instances, you may be charged additional fees for changing the instance types of the instances to cope with your business demand changes. You want to use pay-as-you-go instances instead to reduce costs. | Savings plans can be applied regardless of the instance type and operating system.
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Your business is deployed across regions and instance types, and you want to simplify budgeting and reduce cost management complexity in the cloud. | |
You want to continuously optimize costs when you use pay-as-you-go ECS instances and elastic container instances. |
Types and application rules
A savings plan is a discount plan that provides significant savings over pay-as-you-go rates in exchange for a commitment to use a consistent amount of resources for a specific period of time. After a savings plan takes effect, you can apply the savings plan to eligible pay-as-you-go instances to reduce costs.
The following table describes the differences between different types of savings plans. For more information, see Purchase and apply savings plans.
Item | General-purpose savings plan | ECS compute savings plan |
Scenario | This savings plan is suitable for scenarios in which resource usage is stable, such as system upgrades and cluster deployment. In the scenarios, instances may be frequently created and released, but the overall usage is stable. | This savings plan is suitable for scenarios in which resource usage is stable, such as system upgrades and cluster deployment. In the scenarios, instances may be frequently created and released, but the overall usage is stable. |
Use across regions | Supported. | Not supported. |
Limits on ECS instance families or the creation methods of elastic container instances | Applicable to ECS instances regardless of the instance family. | Applicable to ECS instances of a specific instance family set or instance family. |
Flexibility on instance types | Allows changes between instance types. | Allows changes between instance types within an instance family or instance family set. |
Hourly spend commitment | You purchase a savings plan with an hourly spend commitment. You are charged the hourly spend commitment regardless of whether the savings plan is applied. | You purchase a savings plan with an hourly spend commitment. You are charged the hourly spend commitment regardless of whether the savings plan is applied. |
Supported payment options | All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront. | All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront. |
Supported durations | 1 year and 3 years | 1 year and 3 years |
Effective time and expiration time |
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Discounts | Discounts provided by a savings plan vary based on the type, term, and payment option of the savings plan. For more information, see the Discounts provided by savings plans section of the "Savings plans" topic. | |
Lifecycles
Effectivity and expiration of savings plans
After you purchase a savings plans with an hourly spend commitment, you are charged based on the Savings Plan rates for the committed usage and based on the pay-as-you-go rates for usage beyond the commitment. You pay the hourly spend commitment even if your hourly usage does not reach the commitment level.
A savings plan is applied to offset fees for eligible pay-as-you-go resources that are generated from the time when the savings plan takes effect to the time when the savings plan expires. Savings plans take effect and expire at on-the-hour points in time.
Expired savings plans cannot be applied to offset fees for pay-as-you-go instances. However, the pay-as-you-go instances are not released to ensure your business continuity. To ensure that pay-as-you-go instances run as expected, make sure that your account balance is sufficient.
For example, if you purchased a one-year savings plan that takes effect immediately at 13:45 on October 29, 2021, the savings plan took effect at 13:00 on October 29, 2021 and expired at 13:00 on October 29, 2022. If you had eligible pay-as-you-go instances, the savings plan was applied to offset the hourly fees for the pay-as-you-go instances from 13:00:00 on October 29, 2021 until the savings plan expired.
Resumption of savings plans suspended due to overdue payments
Partial Upfront or No Upfront savings plans are suspended if your account has overdue payments. After a savings plan is suspended due to an overdue payment, the savings plan cannot be applied to offset fees for pay-as-you-go resources starting from the next hour of the suspension. After you complete the overdue payment, the savings plan resumes.
If a savings plan is suspended multiple times or for an extended period of time due to overdue payments, you may be unable to use the No Upfront payment option. To prevent this issue, make sure that your account balance is sufficient.
After a savings plan is suspended due to an overdue payment, you are still billed for the hourly spend commitment.
Refunds
To request a refund for a savings plan that you no longer need, submit a ticket.
Rates after savings plans are applied
After savings plans are applied, pay-as-you-go instances have two types of rates: pay-as-you-go rates and Savings Plan rates. You are charged based on the Savings Plan rates for the committed usage and based on pay-as-you-go rates for usage beyond the commitment. For information about the discounts that are provided by savings plans, go to the Discount Details page in the Expenses and Costs console.
Example of a general-purpose saving plan
For example, you have multiple pay-as-you-go ecs.g6.xlarge instances in the China (Shanghai) region and purchased a three-year, All Upfront general-purpose savings plan with an hourly spend commitment of USD 0.31.
The prices used in this example are only for reference. For information about the actual prices and discounts, go to the Pricing tab of the Elastic Compute Service product page and the Discount Details page in the Expenses and Costs console.
For example, the pay-as-you-go rate of ecs.g6.xlarge instances is USD 0.155 per instance-hour and the three-year savings plan provides a 54.5% discount off the pay-as-you-go rates for the ecs.g6 instance family in the China (Shanghai) region. The Savings Plan rate of the ecs.g6.xlarge instances is calculated by using the following formula: Pay-as-you-go rate × (1 - Discount provided by the savings plan) = USD 0.155 per instance-hour × (1 - 0.545) = USD 0.0705 per instance-hour. The savings plans with the USD 0.31-per-hour commitment can be used to offset the hourly fees for up to 4.397 pay-as-you-go ecs.g6.xlarge instances, which is calculated by using the following formula: Hourly spend commitment/Savings Plan rate = 0.31/0.0705 = 4.397.
The following table describes the differences between the pay-as-you-go prices and the discounted pay-as-you-go prices after the savings plan is applied.
Price | First hour (if 6 instances are running) | Second hour (if 5 instances are running) | Third hour (if 4 instances are running) |
Pay-as-you-go prices without the savings plan | 6 * 0.155 = 0.93 USD | 5 * 0.155 = 0.775 USD | 4 * 0.155 = 0.62 USD |
Lower prices after the savings plan is applied | The savings plan can be applied to offset the hourly fees for 4.397 instances. The amount charged for all your instances includes the following items:
Total = 0.31 + 0.155 × (6 - 0.31/0.0705) = USD 0.558. | The savings plan can be applied to offset the hourly fees for 4.397 instances. The amount charged for all your instances includes the following items:
Total = 0.31 + 0.155 × (5 - 0.31/0.0705) = USD 0.403. | The number of running instances is smaller than the maximum number of instances (4.397 instances) to which the savings plan can be applied. The hourly spend commitment can cover your instance usage. You are charged only the hourly spend commitment. Total = USD 0.31. |
Deduction rules
Savings plans and reserved instances can be applied to offset fees for pay-as-you-go instances. If you have multiple discount plans, the plans are applied in the following sequence:
Reserved instances and resource plans, such as storage capacity units (SCUs)
ECS compute savings plans
General-purpose savings plans
Coupons
When you use savings plans, the following rules apply:
If your pay-as-you-go instances are charged based on a discount that is higher than the discount of your savings plans, the higher discount is applied first and the discounted fees are deducted from the commitments of the savings plans.
If you have different types of savings plans that provide different discounts, the savings plans are applied based on their expiration times, from the earliest to the latest. If savings plans have the same expiration time, the savings plans are applied based on their purchase times. For example, if you purchase a 5-year All Upfront savings plan and then purchase a 1-year Partial Upfront savings plan one year later, the Partial Upfront savings plan expires before the All Upfront savings plan. In this case, the Partial Upfront savings plan is applied before the All Upfront savings plan.
Savings plans are more flexible than reserved instances. We recommend that you use savings plans instead of reserved instances to reduce the costs of pay-as-you-go instances in specific scenarios. The following table describes the scenarios.
Scenario | Savings plans applied to pay-as-you-go instances | Reserved instances applied to pay-as-you-go instances |
Your business is deployed on instances that run different operating systems. | Savings plans are applied regardless of the instance operating system. | Reserved instances are operating system-specific. |
You want to change the instance families of instances or upgrade instances to next-generation instance families. | General-purpose savings plans can be applied to instances regardless of the instance family. You can apply ECS compute savings plans to specific instance family sets. | Reserved instances can be applied only to a specific instance family or instance type. |
Your business spans multiple regions and requires nearby resources. | General-purpose savings plans are applied regardless of the region. | Reserved instances can be applied only in a specific region. |
For information about the differences between the subscription billing method, pay-as-you-go billing method, reserved instances, and savings plans and the corresponding usage scenarios, see Instance types.
Limits
The following table describes the limits on the usage of savings plans.
Resource | Item | Limit |
Savings plans | Quantity | You can purchase up to 200 savings plans for each Alibaba Cloud account. |
ECS instances and elastic container instances | Payment options | Savings plans can match only pay-as-you-go instances, except preemptible instances. |
Resource | Savings plans can be applied to the following resources:
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Cross-account usage of savings plans
Benefits
You can use the corporate finance feature in Expenses and Costs to manage the financial relationships among multiple Alibaba Cloud accounts in a centralized manner. The corporate finance feature allows you to establish trusteeship between Alibaba Cloud accounts and use a main account to settle the bills of linked accounts. After you establish a trusteeship, you can share the savings plans in the main account to offset the fees for pay-as-you-go instances in the linked accounts.
In corporate finance, main accounts and linked accounts are independent Alibaba Cloud accounts that are used to grant financial management permissions. These accounts are different from Alibaba Cloud accounts and Resource Access Management (RAM) users that are used in RAM.
Limits
The following limits apply when you use savings plans across accounts:
You cannot share savings plans in linked accounts.
If you purchase savings plans for linked accounts, the savings plans take precedence over shared savings plans.