Alibaba Cloud pricing and plans guide in the UK (2025)

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, the popular Chinese e-commerce giant. The Group launched its cloud platform in September 2009¹, internally as “Aliyun”, to help its e-commerce ecosystem (Taobao and Tmall) handle the vast amounts of data and complex transactions¹.

Over the years, Alibaba Cloud has gradually expanded its operations outside mainland China with data centers in more than 20 regions worldwide², including London³. As a small business in the UK, it is essential to have a clear understanding of Alibaba Cloud pricing if you are considering using their cloud services for your operations. This is what this article is all about: a deep dive into the different Alibaba Cloud pricing tiers and every other important detail about the cloud platform

For businesses exploring Alibaba Cloud pricing in the UK, using the Wise Business multi-currency card provides a smart way to manage subscription payments while saving money. This card gives you access to 40+ currencies, helping you avoid expensive conversion markups and save money on international transactions.

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Alibaba Cloud ECS pricing overview

Although Alibaba Cloud offers a variety of cloud hosting services, this review will focus on its standard compute Alibaba Cloud ECS This is a high-performance, stable, reliable, and scalable IaaS-level service by Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud offers four pricing models for their ECS⁴. Each model is designed to suit different users and instances. So whether you're an individual looking to host a side project, a startup testing new products, or an enterprise running 24/7 databases, there’s a pricing model for you.

Pricing model	Description
Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) ⁴	This pricing model lets you pay only for the active compute time by the second.
Subscription ⁴	Unlike the PAYG, the subscription model requires you to pay upfront for the cloud resource.
Savings Plans ⁴	This is best suited for companies seeking long-term commitments and stability.
Reserved Instances ⁴	Reserved Instances let you prepay for Elastic Compute Service (ECS) usage for 1 or 3 years.

Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) Pricing (or On-Demand Pricing)

This pricing model works just like your mobile prepaid plan. This means you only pay for the seconds or hours of the compute capacity that you use without any long-term commitment. The PAYG pricing model is transparent and very flexible. You can start, stop, or release ECS instances at any time. When you stop or release your instance, your billing also stops.

Pay-As-You-Go Features

This plan offers on-demand and self-service resource provisioning. This means you can provision resources to fit your business demands.
Additionally, there’s metered billing, which allows you to pay based on the amount of resource consumption (such as storage, computing power, and data transfer) without a long-term commitment.

Is Pay-As-You-Go Right for My Business?

The Pay-As-You-Go plan is ideal for businesses with unpredictable workloads. Think of startups, companies in the development and testing stage, or seasonal businesses.
Companies that also want to experiment, test prototypes, or run short-term projects without long-term financial commitments can consider using this plan.

Subscription Pricing

Unlike the Pay-As-You-GO (PAYG) model, where you’re billed after use, here you pay for your cloud resources upfront.
You’re charged for a set period, usually monthly or yearly, so you won’t get any surprise bills during your subscription. Plus, subscriptions are often cheaper than PAYG, and the longer you commit, the bigger the discount.

Subscription Features

The Subscription model includes cloud computing resources (such as vCPUs and memory), images, disks, and public bandwidth, which you need to pay for in advance.Your subscription typically covers all the basic cloud resources you need. If you ever want to upgrade your server or storage, you just pay the difference. And if you decide to downgrade, you’ll get a refund according to Alibaba Cloud’s policy⁵. When your subscription ends, your server stops automatically, so you don’t have to worry about unexpected charges.

Is Subscription right for my business?

The Subscription plan is a great choice if your business needs stable, always-on services. An ideal example is web hosting, databases, or apps that have to be available 24/7. It’s especially useful if your workloads are predictable and you want the peace of mind that comes with knowing exactly what you’ll pay each month. With this plan, you pay for your resources upfront, so there are no surprises when it comes to costs.

Savings Plan Pricing

Alibaba Cloud ECS Savings pricing provides a significant discount over Pay-As-You-Go rates by up to 70%⁶. This discount is provided in exchange for a commitment to an hourly spend over a one- or three-year period. With this plan, you get all the flexibility of Pay-As-You-Go billing, but at a much discounted price.

Savings Plan Features

This plan supports flexible commitment, but instead of committing to specific instances, you are only committing to an hourly spending amount. You get an automatic discount on any ECS instances (type/OS/region) that match your commitment.

Is a Savings Plan right for my business?

Savings Plans are ideal for your business if you run steady-state workloads (like databases or microservices) and can reliably predict your minimum hourly compute spend.

Reserved Instances Pricing

Reserved Instances let you prepay for Elastic Compute Service (ECS) usage for 1 or 3 years. Compared with pay-as-you-go instances, this billing method provides you with significant discounts up to 79%⁷.

Reserved Instances Features

Reserved Instances require reserving specific instance types in a region but offer flexibility. This plan lets you exchange reserved instances for a different type within the same instance family. There’s an automatic discount when your running instances match the Reserved Instance's type, region, and network type.

Is Reserved Instances right for my business?

If you run steady workloads like databases or enterprise apps needing guaranteed capacity, Reserved Instances could be perfect. If your needs change, you can exchange Reserved Instances within the same instance family.

How much do Alibaba Cloud add-ons cost?

There’s no flat fee for add-ons costs on Alibaba Cloud. The cost of your add-on is entirely dependent on your usage of cloud resources, such as storage and databases.

What is the pricing currency?

Primarily, Alibaba Cloud bills its customers in USD (United States Dollars). Customers can also switch their settlement currency from USD to SGD, HKD, or EUR (for customers in countries in the European Economic Area (EEA).⁷ As of the time of writing, Alibaba Cloud doesn’t support GBP payments. This means customers in the UK would have to settle their cloud bills using a non-GBP currency.

A good option for paying your cloud bills in a non-GBP currency is to use a Wise Business multi-currency card. With Wise, you can hold balances in 40+currencies and pay at real mid-market exchange rates with minimal fees. This helps you save money and high mark up fees.

How to save on your Alibaba Cloud bill next month

As a UK small business, unmanaged cloud costs can spiral fast, and every pound counts. To save on your next Alibaba Cloud bill, start by ensuring you choose the right pricing plan. For example, if you have applications or a website running 24/7, switching from Pay-As-You-Go pricing model to a subscription or Reserve Instance model can help you save on your cloud bill.

Next, conduct an audit with your team to see if there’s any way to cut down your costs. You can start by looking for “zombie resources” like unattached storage disks or non-production environments that are running 24/7 when it shouldn’t.

More importantly, we’d strongly recommend you stop paying your cloud bills in a foreign currency. Paying Alibaba Cloud in USD with a standard UK business card costs you foreign transaction fees plus unfavourable exchange rates. Alternatively, use a Wise Business multi-currency card. With this card, you can settle your cloud bills in 40+ currencies at the mid-market rate (including USD). This helps you avoid paying expensive foreign transaction fees and losing even more to unfavourable exchange rates.

Alibaba Cloud vs. AWS - price comparison

Doing a comparison between Alibaba Cloud vs. AWS from a price standpoint is not possible. This is because these two cloud providers have different pricing, different instance types, and different products. However, to give you an idea of what pricing on these two cloud providers looks like, here’s a quick comparison:

• On Alibaba Cloud, an ECS Linux-based ecs.u1-c1m4.large instance with 2 CPU cores and 8 gigabytes of memory costs in London (UK) server costs $0.098222 (USD) if you’re on Pay-As-You-Go pricing model⁸.
• Alternatively, on AWS Linux-based t4g.large instance with 2 CPU cores and 8 gigabytes of memory London (UK) server costs $0.0752(USD) if you’re on the On-Demand hourly rate model⁹.

Save on Alibaba Cloud fees with Wise Business

Alibaba Cloud provides a wide range of flexible pricing models which helps businesses in the UK choose the right pricing model that best suits them. However, one smart way to optimise your cloud spend is to not pay your bills in foreign currencies. With the Wise multi-currency card, you can pay bills and business expenses in 40+ currencies, including USD. This helps you save money on foreign transfer fees while paying bills in currencies.

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FAQs

Here are a few frequently asked questions about Alibaba Cloud:

Does Alibaba Cloud have a free plan/free trial?

Yes, Alibaba Cloud offers a free trial and a host of free products, both for new and existing users. For new users, there’s a 12-month free ECS (t5 Instance) for newly registered users¹⁰. This helps new users to build small-scale websites or apps with a daily traffic below 1000¹⁰.

Additionally, there is a wide range of always-free products for both new and existing users to explore. Some examples includes¹⁰:

• 500Gb Cloud Drive for Enterprises for 1 month (available to new users)
• 20 Licenses of Alibaba Cloud DevOps for 3 months (available to new users)
• 2C8G PolarDB -50 GB storage (available to all users)

Does Alibaba Cloud have any implementation and onboarding costs?

At the time of writing, Alibaba Cloud doesn’t charge its users any implementation or onboarding fees. However, it provides an end-to-end Alibaba Cloud Managed Service for enterprises that don't have a dedicated cloud ops team¹¹.

Does Alibaba Cloud have an API?

Yes, Alibaba Cloud provides API Gateway¹² and SDKs (Software Development Kits)¹³. These tools enable developers to efficiently build, manage, and secure APIs for cloud applications without writing complex infrastructure code. Alibaba Cloud’s APIs also seamlessly connect your applications to databases, payment systems, and third-party services.

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Sources used in this article:

1. Pioneering Cloud Computing - Alibaba Cloud
2. Global Locations - Alibaba Cloud
3. Alibaba Cloud Expands European Presence with UK Data Centres - Alibaba Cloud Press Room
4. Overview of Billing Methods - Alibaba Cloud
5. Refund rules for configuration downgrades - Alibaba Cloud
6. ECS Savings Plans - Alibaba Cloud
7. Expenses and Costs - Alibaba Cloud
8. Elastic Compute Service - Alibaba Cloud
9. Amazon EC2 On-Demand - AWS
10. Start for Free - Alibaba Cloud
11. Technology Managed Service , Operation and Maintenance - Alibaba Cloud
12. API Gateway - Alibaba Cloud
13. Download and use SDK - Alibaba Cloud

Sources last checked: 29-July-2025