Alibaba Cloud Review 2026: The $90 ECS Credit, Free Tier, Real Prices and the Fine Print

The short verdict

Alibaba Cloud is a credible, low-cost option at the entry level, especially for workloads that serve Asia. Its Simple Application Server plans start at USD 3.5 a month with 1 TB of transfer, and outside mainland China every account gets 200 GB of free outbound internet traffic a month on pay-by-traffic instances.

The weak points are on the money side. There is no hard spending cap, only alerts that take two days to switch on. ECS and Simple Application Server cannot be refunded in full even when unused, despite the refund page's "5-day no-reason" headline. And if a pay-as-you-go bill goes unpaid, instances stop on day 15 and their disks are released about 15 days later, with no way to recover the data.

What we like

• USD 90 of ECS credit valid for 3 months, plus dozens of other trial offers
• Simple Application Server from USD 3.5/month with 1 TB of transfer included
• 200 GB/month of free outbound traffic outside mainland China
• Per-second pay-as-you-go billing on ECS
• 107 availability zones in 31 regions
• Clear SLA credits: 10%, 25% or 100% of the monthly fee

What to watch

• A credit or debit card is required for the free tier, and PayPal is not accepted for it
• No hard spending cap - alerts and budgets only
• No full refund on unused ECS or Simple Application Server subscriptions
• Unpaid pay-as-you-go resources are stopped at T+15 and released 15 days later
• Mainland China regions need identity verification and, for websites, an ICP filing

What the free tier actually gives you

The free page banner reads: "AI Cloud Free Trial … Build your AI MVP. The only free trial that gives you Free tokens, 400+ Models plus 80+ other tools. ECS with $90 Credits - Many Specs & Multi-instance Trial." Further down it advertises "80+ Products For Free" with offers running "up to 12 months free".

The ECS credit

The ECS card says "USD 90 Free Credits (Valid for 3 Months)". The page does not list which instance specs or quotas the credit covers, so treat it as a three-month testing budget rather than a promise of a fixed always-on server. Set a spending alert before you launch anything, because the alert itself takes two days to start working.

Other free offers

• Model Studio: free tokens across 400+ models
• OSS object storage: 500 GB for 1 month (another card on the page says 1 TB for 1 month)
• PolarDB: 2 vCPU / 8 GB, always free
• ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL Basic: 2 vCPU / 4 GB for 1 month
• Function Compute: 150,000 CUs
• File Storage NAS: 100 GB for 1 month
• Tair (Redis OSS-compatible): 1 GB for 30 days
• Elastic Desktop Service: 4 vCPU / 8 GB for 1 month
• Log Service: 20 CU for 6 months; API Gateway: 12 months
• Quick BI AIPro: USD 125 in credits for 1 month; Cloud Firewall: USD 70 plan for 3 months
• Edge Security Acceleration Entrance and Data Security Center: always free

A separate group of services is labelled "Free to Use", including VPC, RAM (access management), CloudMonitor, ActionTrail, Anti-DDoS Basic, Security Center Basic, Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), Auto Scaling and Container Registry. Note that the Kubernetes control plane being free does not make the ECS nodes under it free.

Real prices: Simple Application Server, ECS and storage

ECS instance list prices load client-side on Alibaba Cloud's site and we could not read them reliably, so we use Simple Application Server, Alibaba Cloud's bundled VPS product, as the concrete entry price. For ECS instance pricing, run your exact region and instance type through the official pricing calculator.

Simple Application Server, Linux plans (per month)

• USD 3.5: 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD, 4 Mbit/s, 1 TB transfer
• USD 4.5: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD, 4 Mbit/s, 1 TB transfer
• USD 9: 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, 6 Mbit/s, 1.5 TB transfer
• USD 15: 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 60 GB SSD, 10 Mbit/s, 2 TB transfer
• USD 19: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD, 15 Mbit/s, 4 TB transfer
• USD 35: 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB SSD, 20 Mbit/s, 5 TB transfer
• USD 70: 4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 320 GB SSD, 30 Mbit/s, 6 TB transfer

Which regions sell the USD 3.5 and USD 4.5 plans is not stated, so expect availability to vary by region. Plans are prepaid monthly or yearly, and traffic beyond the package is "charged at the Pay-As-You-Go rate". The page counts 1 TB as 1,024 GB. Note the bandwidth caps: the entry plans top out at 4 Mbit/s, which suits a small site or a bot, not a media-heavy app.

Windows plans cost USD 11, 19, 28, 38, 65 and 110 per month. The cheapest has 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD and 1 TB of transfer.

Overage traffic per GB: US (Virginia) USD 0.076, US (Silicon Valley) 0.077, Frankfurt 0.07, London 0.07, Singapore 0.081, Kuala Lumpur 0.077, Tokyo 0.087, Jakarta 0.09 and Hong Kong 0.153.

How ECS is billed

ECS supports Subscription, Pay-as-you-go, Spot Instance, Pay-as-you-go + Reserved Instance and Pay-as-you-go + Savings Plan. Pay-as-you-go resources "are billed per second, and consumption details are generated hourly". There is a minimum billing duration per instance: 10 minutes for 1 vCPU, 5 minutes for 2 vCPUs and 2 minutes for 4 vCPUs or more.

Data transfer: the generous part

Since June 1, 2025, Alibaba Cloud's Cloud Data Transfer (CDT) free quota is 220 GB per month: 20 GB for regions in mainland China and 200 GB for regions outside it. It applies only to pay-by-data-transfer instances on BGP (Multi-ISP) lines, so fixed-bandwidth instances do not draw on it.

Beyond the free quota, here is what BGP internet traffic costs per GB. The first figure is the ECS rate; the CDT figures are tiered by monthly volume (0-10 TB / 10-50 TB / 50-150 TB / over 150 TB).

• US (Virginia): ECS 0.076; CDT 0.074 / 0.065 / 0.060 / 0.040
• Frankfurt: ECS 0.070; CDT 0.074 / 0.065 / 0.060 / 0.040
• Singapore: ECS 0.081; CDT 0.100 / 0.070 / 0.065 / 0.055
• Hong Kong: ECS 0.153; CDT first tier 0.100
• UAE (Dubai): ECS 0.153; CDT first tier 0.116
• Mainland China (excluding Qingdao): ECS 0.123; CDT first tier 0.118

Billing controls: alerts, not caps

Alibaba Cloud offers two spending tools. A high-consumption alert means "the system sends a daily notification when a product's bill exceeds the alert threshold", and these alerts "take effect two days after configuration (T+2)". Budgets let you set an amount and alert rules, after which the system "sends alerts through email, and internal messages when a threshold is triggered".

What happens if a bill goes unpaid

1. Pay-as-you-go bills get three deduction attempts: on the settlement date (T), at T+7 and at T+14.
2. During those 15 days your services keep running, but you cannot buy new resources, upgrade instances or enable auto-renewal.
3. If all three attempts fail, the instance is stopped and billing ceases on T+15.
4. After 15 days stopped, the system begins releasing pay-as-you-go ECS resources. "Disks are released, and their data cannot be recovered."

Subscription instances work differently but end the same way: if you do not renew within the grace period, the instance is released and "all data stored on the instance is lost and cannot be recovered." Make sure the card on file is valid and that billing emails reach an inbox someone reads.

Refunds: read the table, not the title

The refund page's title promises a "5-day no-reason" full refund. The table in its body tells a different story for the two products most people buy first. For ECS and Simple Application Server, "unused full-amount unsubscription" is marked Unsupported. Partial unsubscription and cancelling an unapplied renewal order are Supported.

Partial refunds are calculated as "actual cash paid - consumed amount", and the consumed amount is recalculated "by rematching the discount applicable to a short-term purchase". In plain terms, if you bought a year at a discount and cancel after two months, those two months are repriced at the monthly rate before the refund is worked out.

Pay-as-you-go products have nothing to unsubscribe from: you back up your data and release the resource to stop billing.

Refunds go back to the original payment channel within 30 business days. Card payments can be refunded to the card within 365 days of payment, after which the money goes to your account balance. PayPal payments can be refunded within 180 days.

When no refund is possible

• You have unpaid orders
• The resource has been transferred to another account
• The promotion explicitly said "no refund"
• The ECS instance uses a paid image
• The monthly refund quota for subscription ECS is used up (it resets on the 1st of each month)
• The settlement currency does not match
• You bought through a distributor

After unsubscription, the resource is released automatically and its data is not retained, so back up first.

Sign-up, payment and the mainland China question

Alibaba Cloud accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, UnionPay, JCB, Discover and Diners Club cards, the Alipay CN and PayPal wallets, and bank transfer for credit-control customers. What you can actually use depends on which Alibaba entity you contract with (Singapore, US, UK, Netherlands or Malaysia), and American Express is not supported for at least one of them. Remember that PayPal does not count for the free tier.

Identity verification is required only if you plan to buy or use products deployed in mainland China. The accepted documents are a passport or a driver's license, with "no alternative verification methods". If you only hold a mainland China resident ID card, Alibaba directs you to Alibaba Cloud China (aliyun.com) instead.

Websites whose domains resolve to servers in mainland China regions also need an ICP filing, which adds paperwork and time. If you do not specifically need mainland China hosting, regions such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Frankfurt or Virginia avoid both requirements.

In total, Alibaba Cloud says it "operates 107 availability zones in 31 regions around the world".

Support plans and the ECS SLA

• Basic: free with any Alibaba Cloud service
• Developer: USD 19.99/month, auto-renewal optional
• Business: from USD 100/month, based on monthly cloud usage
• Enterprise: from USD 8,000/month, based on monthly cloud usage

For ECS, Alibaba Cloud commits to monthly availability of at least 99.975% for a single instance and 99.995% for instances deployed across multiple zones. Below that, you get service credits: 10% of the monthly fee for the instance if availability is at or above 99%, 25% if it is at or above 95%, and 100% below 95%. Multi-zone deployments use the same bands, starting below 99.995%.

Claims can be filed from the sixth working day of the following month and must reach Alibaba Cloud within 60 days. As with every major cloud, credits offset future bills; they do not compensate for lost business.

Who should use Alibaba Cloud

A good fit if you

• Serve users in Asia, or need a path into mainland China later
• Want a cheap, fixed-price VPS with generous transfer for a small project
• Push meaningful outbound traffic and can use the 200 GB free allowance
• Want to test Qwen and other models in Model Studio on free tokens

Look elsewhere if you

• Need a hard spending cap that stops resources automatically
• Want to pay for the free tier with PayPal
• Expect a full refund on an unused server subscription
• Rely on a large English-language community and third-party tooling built around one cloud

Frequently asked questions

Is Alibaba Cloud really free to try?

Yes, within limits. New users of computing products get USD 90 of ECS credit valid for 3 months, plus trials of 80+ products, some always free. Each product's free tier can be claimed once per person or organization, and a card is required.

Can I use PayPal for the free tier?

No. The free page states that "PayPal is not supported for Alibaba Cloud Free Tier". You need a credit or debit card, although PayPal can be used for regular paid purchases with some contracting entities.

Can I get a full refund on an ECS or Simple Application Server subscription?

No. Alibaba Cloud's refund table marks unused full-amount unsubscription as unsupported for both. You can cancel part of a subscription, but the used time is repriced at the short-term rate before the refund is calculated.

Can I set a spending limit on Alibaba Cloud?

Not a hard one. You can set high-consumption alerts and budgets that send email and internal messages, but neither stops resources automatically. Alerts start working two days after you configure them.

What happens if I do not pay a bill?

Your pay-as-you-go instances are stopped on day 15 after the settlement date, and released about 15 days after that. Released disks cannot be recovered, so keep a valid card on file.

How much free bandwidth does Alibaba Cloud include?

200 GB per month of outbound internet traffic in regions outside mainland China, and 20 GB in mainland regions, for pay-by-traffic instances on BGP lines. Simple Application Server plans also include their own monthly transfer, starting at 1 TB.

Do I need a passport to sign up?

Only for mainland China. Identity verification with a passport or driver's license is required to buy or use products deployed in mainland China regions. Other regions do not require it.

What is the cheapest Alibaba Cloud server?

Simple Application Server starts at USD 3.5 per month for 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD and 1 TB of transfer on Linux, though that plan is not sold in every region. Windows plans start at USD 11.

Key takeaways

• The USD 90 ECS credit lasts 3 months and requires a card; PayPal is not accepted for the free tier.
• Simple Application Server from USD 3.5/month with 1 TB of transfer is the clearest entry price.
• Outside mainland China you get 200 GB/month of free outbound traffic on pay-by-traffic BGP instances.
• There is no hard spending cap - set alerts early, since they take two days to activate.
• ECS and Simple Application Server cannot be refunded in full; partial refunds are repriced at short-term rates.
• Unpaid pay-as-you-go instances stop at T+15 and their disks are released 15 days later, unrecoverably.