Yearly/Monthly Billing

Application Scenarios

In yearly/monthly billing mode, you need to pay for a required duration in advance. This mode is suitable for long-term and relatively fixed service requirements. The yearly/monthly billing mode is recommended for the following scenarios:

• Stable services: enterprise websites, online malls, blogs, and others. Yearly/Monthly billing provides higher cost efficiency.
• Long-term projects: scientific research projects, large-scale events, and others. Yearly/Monthly billing facilitates stable supply of resources throughout the project.
• Service peak estimation: e-commerce promotion season, festivals, holidays, and others. Resources insufficiency can be avoided by pre-purchasing resources for peak demands.
• High data security: For services that require high data security, yearly/monthly billing facilitates continuous usage of the resources.

Billing Items

The following billing items support yearly/monthly billing:

If you plan to purchase the professional edition SA with one ECS quota, and select the yearly/monthly billing mode (the subscription duration is one month), at the bottom of the SA purchase page, you can view the fee details, as shown in the following figure.

Figure 1 Example price

The price includes:

• Professional: the fees for the professional edition and the ECS quota.

Billing Period

The billing period of yearly/monthly SA is determined by the required duration (UTC+8:00). The billing period starts from the time you activate or renew your subscription (precise to seconds), and ends at 23:59:59 on the expiration date.

For example, if you purchase the SA professional edition with one ECS quota for one month at 15:50:04 on June 30, 2023, the billing period is from 15:50:04 on June 30, 2023 to 23:59:59 on July 30, 2023.

Billing Examples

If you purchased the yearly/monthly SA professional edition (ECS quota: 1) at 15:50:04 on June 30, 2023, the billing resources include the professional edition and ECS quota. Your subscription is one month and you manually renew the subscription for another month before the subscription expires. The billing details are as follows:

• The first billing period is from 15:50:04 on June 30, 2023 to 23:59:59 on July 30, 2023.
• The second billing period is from 23:59:59 on July 30, 2023 to 23:59:59 on Aug. 30, 2023.

You must prepay for each billing period. Table 2 shows the billing formula.

Figure 2 shows the billing calculation.

The prices shown in the figure are for reference only. The final price is determined by the specific order. For details, see SA Pricing Details.

Figure 2 Pricing example of yearly/monthly SA

Impact on Billing After Specification Change

If you change the current specifications of your yearly/monthly SA to meet your service changes, the following pricing rules are used:

Edition upgrade: You need to pay the price difference.

Currently, SA does not support changing the edition to an earlier edition. If you want to use SA of an earlier edition, unsubscribe from the one you are using first and subscribe to the one you want.

Assume that you purchased the standard yearly/monthly SA (ECS quota: 1) edition for one month on June 8, 2023 without any discount and you expect to change SA to the professional edition on June 18, 2023. The price of the old configuration is $1.6 USD/month, and that of the new configuration is $24 USD/month. The formula is as follows:

Specification upgrade fee = New specification price × Remaining period - Old specification price × Remaining period

The remaining period in the formula is the remaining days of each calendar month divided by the maximum days of corresponding calendar month. In this example, the remaining period = 12 (Remaining days in June)/30 (Maximum number of days in June) + 8 (Remaining days in July)/31 (Maximum number of days in July) = 0.6581. Price difference = 24 x 0.6581 – 10 x 0.6581 = $9.21 USD

For more information, see Pricing of a Changed Specification.

Impacts of Expiration

Figure 3 describes the status of yearly/monthly SA resources in each phase. After purchasing a resource, it remains operational throughout the billing cycle. This can be referred to as the validity period. If the resource is not renewed after expiration, it enters the grace period and then the retention period.

Figure 3 Yearly/Monthly SA lifecycle

Expiration Reminder

From the 7th day before a yearly/monthly SA edition expires, the system will send an expiration reminder to the creator of the account by email, SMS, and internal message.

Impact After Expiration

If your yearly/monthly SA resources expire and are not renewed, the resources enter the grace periods. During the grace period, you can use the service.

If you do not renew your yearly/monthly SA before the grace period ends, it goes into the retention period and its status turns to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on such instances in the retention period.

For details, see Retention Period.

If the yearly/monthly SA resources are still not renewed after the grace period ends, the SA resources will be released and data cannot be restored.

For details about renewal, see Renewal Overview.