Updated on 2024-07-18 GMT+08:00

Comparison of Billing Modes

There are yearly/monthly and pay-per-use billing modes. Each one has different advantages and disadvantages.

  • Yearly/Monthly is a prepaid billing mode. You pay in advance for a subscription term, and in exchange, you get a discounted rate. The longer the subscription term, the bigger the discount. Yearly/Monthly billing is a good option for long-term, stable services.
  • Pay-per-use is a postpaid billing mode. You pay as you go and just pay for what you use. The DB instance usage is calculated by the second but billed every hour. There are no wasted resources.

Table 1 lists the differences between the two billing modes.

Table 1 Differences between billing modes

Item

Yearly/Monthly

Pay-per-use

Payment

Prepaid

Postpaid

Billing Method

Billed by the subscription term you purchase

Calculated by the second but billed every hour

Billed Items

Instance classes (vCPUs and memory), storage space, backup space, cross-region backup, Monitoring by Seconds (for RDS for MySQL only), images (for RDS for SQL Server only), deployment in Dedicated Computing Cluster (DCC), EIPs, and database proxies (for RDS for MySQL only).

Instance classes (vCPUs and memory), storage space, backup space, cross-region backup, Monitoring by Seconds (for RDS for MySQL only), images (for RDS for SQL Server only), deployment in Dedicated Computing Cluster (DCC), EIPs, and database proxies (for RDS for MySQL only).

Changing the Billing Mode

Yearly/Monthly can be changed to pay-per-use.

The change takes effect only after the yearly/monthly subscription expires.

For details, see Yearly/Monthly to Pay-per-Use.

Pay-per-use can be changed to yearly/monthly.

For details, see Pay-per-Use to Yearly/Monthly.

Changing the instance class

Supported

Supported

Scaling up storage space

Supported

Supported

Changing an instance from single-node to primary/standby

Supported

Supported

Creating an instance using an API

Supported

Supported

Deleting an instance

Supported

Supported

Application Scenarios

Recommended for resources expected to be in use long-term. A cost-effective option for scenarios where the resource usage duration is predictable.

Recommended when the resource demands are likely to fluctuate and you want more flexibility.