What Are Savings Plans?

Introduction

Savings Plans is a flexible billing option that provides significant savings on your Huawei Cloud usage. You can get lower prices compared to pay-per-use pricing in exchange for a commitment to use a specified amount of resources (measured in USD/hour) for a one- or three-year term. If your hourly resource usage is fully covered by the hourly commitment, you will be billed only for the hourly commitment at the discounted rate. Any resource usage beyond the hourly commitment will be billed at standard pay-per-use rates.

Savings plans need to be used for your pay-per-use resources. They give you pricing discounts but do not affect the provisioning of your resources.

Application Scenarios

If you have relatively stable pay-per-use resource demands, buying a savings plan lets you reduce Huawei Cloud costs.

**Table 1** Application scenarios for savings plans
Scenario	Savings Plan
Services need to be adjusted, and instance types need to be able to change and adapt.	No savings plans limit instance sizes.
Budgeting needs to be simplified.	When you make a budget with a savings plan, you just need an estimate of your total expected needs. You do not need to budget for other dimensions, such as instance types and sizes. This allows you to easily select the resources you desire.

Benefits

Low prices

Savings plans provide significant savings compared to pay-per-use pricing. For example, if you purchase a 3-year, all upfront savings plan, you will get savings up to 73% off pay-per-use pricing.
Flexible use

Savings plans offer low prices, like yearly/monthly subscriptions, but with added flexibility. When you have an active savings plan, the savings plan benefit is applied automatically to all pay-per-use resources that match the savings plan scope, and the resources are billed at the discount offered by the savings plan. You do not have to worry about when the resources expire. You can enable and release the resources at any time without incurring any extra expenditures from operations, such as unsubscriptions or specification changes.
Multiple payment options

Savings plans give you the flexibility to use no upfront or all upfront payments. The more you pay up front, the better discounts you will get.

Lifecycle

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Validation or Expiration
Savings plans become active immediately after purchase and take effect at the top of the hour you purchased them. Both the validation time and the expiration time of a savings plan starts at the beginning of the current hour, regardless of the exact time.

For example, if you purchased a 1-year savings plan at 13:45:20, December 6, 2022, then the validation time of the savings plan is 13:00:00, December 6, 2022, and its expiration time will be 12:59:59, December 6, 2023. If you have pay-per-use resources that match the savings plan, the hourly usage of those resources will be paid for using the savings plan from 13:00 to 14:00 on December 6, 2022.

If your savings plan expires, the usage of pay-per-use resources will be billed at standard rates, and you need to ensure that your account balance is sufficient.
Grace Period
If you have purchased a partial upfront or no upfront savings plan, and your usage has exceeded the expenditure quota, then your savings plan will enter a grace period, during which your pay-per-use resource usage can still be paid for using the savings plan. If the grace period ends but your expenditure quota is still exceeded, the savings plan will be unsubscribed. There are no handling fees for the unsubscription.