A savings plan is a discount plan that can be applied to offset the bills of pay-as-you-go instances, excluding preemptible instances. This topic describes the definition and mechanism of savings plans.
Definition
A savings plan is a discount plan that Alibaba Cloud provides. When you purchase a savings plan, you make a commitment to use a consistent amount of resources on an hourly basis for a specific period of time, such as one year or three years, to receive discounted billing. A savings plan is more cost-effective than the pay-as-you-go billing method. Compared with the subscription billing method, the combination of savings plans and the pay-as-you-go billing method is more flexible.
Mechanism
When you purchase a savings plan, you must commit to an hourly resource consumption amount. You are charged for resource consumption within your commitment based on the savings plan unit price. For resource consumption beyond your commitment, you are charged at the regular pay-as-you-go unit price. You are charged the full committed consumption amount per hour even if your resource consumption amount in an hour does not reach the committed amount.
Example:
The regular pay-as-you-go unit price of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) Instance Type A is USD 12/instance/hour. The discounted unit price of ECS Instance Type A after a savings plan is used is USD 4.75/instance/hour.
You purchase a savings plan and commit to an hourly consumption amount of USD 95. Therefore, the maximum number of instances that can be discounted is 95/4.75 = 20.
In the actual usage, you run 25 instances of Instance Type A in the first hour and 15 instances of Instance Type A in the second hour.
Billing method | Fee for the first hour | Fee for the second hour | Total fee |
Pay-as-you-go | 25 × USD 12 × 1 = USD 300 | 15 × USD 12 × 1 = USD 180 | 480 USD |
Pay-as-you-go + Savings plan | Committed amount: 95 USD Fee exceeding the committed amount: (25 - 95/4.75) × USD 12 × 1 = USD 60 | Committed amount: 95 USD Fee exceeding the committed amount: 0 USD | 250 USD |
Supported Alibaba Cloud services
Savings plan | Supported cloud service | Applicable item |
ECS compute savings plans | ECS and Elastic Container Instance Note ECS and Elastic Container Instance share a savings plan. | Pay-as-you-go ECS instances, elastic container instances, and immediate capacity reservations |
General-purpose savings plans | ECS and Elastic Container Instance Note ECS and Elastic Container Instance share a savings plan. | Pay-as-you-go ECS instances, elastic container instances, immediate capacity reservations, cloud disks, and disk performance |