In this post, I want to introduce you to the free tier and always-free services offered by Alibaba Cloud. It’s important to test out the platform and try out the services before deciding to use a cloud provider or before taking a certification exam. This will give you a chance to get a feel for the platform and gain some experience using the console.

Alibaba Cloud free tier

The Alibaba Cloud Free Tier allows you to try out the platform, products, and services for free and gain practical experience with them.

As part of the Alibaba Cloud Free Tier, you can use the following Alibaba Cloud services/products for free each month:

• ECS t5 (1 CPU, 1 GB) 12 months free
• ECS t6 (2 CPU, 2 GB) 3 months free
• Server Load Balancer 750 hrs 50+ GB
• Object Storage Service 100 GB
• Network Attached Storage 5 GB storage 6 months instance
• Tablestore 100 GB storage 750 hrs instance
• Hybrid Backup Recovery 100 GB storage 3 months instance
• ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL 1 month 1 instance 2 nodes
• ApsaraDB RDS for PostgreSQL 1 month 1 instance single node
• ApsaraDB for Redis 1 month 4 GB instance
• ApsaraDB for MongoDB 1 month 1 instance 3 nodes
• Developer After-sales support plan 1 month
• API Gateway 1 MM calls/month 1 year

The Alibaba Cloud Free Tier is available in all of the global regions. Your free usage is calculated monthly across all regions and is automatically applied to your bill. Free usage does not accumulate from one month to the next.

How do I sign up for an Alibaba Cloud free tier account?

To create an Alibaba Cloud account with free tier, click here to create one using my invitation code :).

All new customer accounts are eligible to sign up for the Alibaba Cloud free usage tier, regardless of whether they are students, entrepreneurs, small businesses, or Fortune 500 companies.

When does the Alibaba Cloud free usage tier end?

The free tier offers are available to new Alibaba Cloud customers for 12 months after signing up. Once the 12-month period has ended or if your usage exceeds the limits of the tier, you will be charged the standard pay-as-you-go rates for the services.

After your 12-month Alibaba Cloud Free Tier term ends, there are some offers that do not expire and are available to all Alibaba Cloud customers.

Alibaba Cloud Free Services

There are several Alibaba Cloud services that do not have any additional charges. You only pay for the Alibaba Cloud resources you use to store and run your applications. The pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go model with no minimum fees or upfront commitments. You only pay for the resources you consume as you use them.

The following Alibaba Cloud services are always free:

1. Elastic Computing:
   • Container Registry
   • Operation Orchestration Service
   • Resource Orchestration Service
   • Auto Scaling
   • Web App Service
   • Container Service for Kubernetes
2. Network and Databases:
   • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
   • ADAM
   • DMS – Flexible Management
   • DAS Basic
3. Security and Artificial Intelligence:
   • Anti-DDoS Basic
   • Resource Access Management (RAM)
   • ActionTrail
   • Security Center Basic
4. Applications and Developers:
   • Application Configuration Management
   • Message Service
   • CloudMonitor
   • OpenAPI Explorer
   • Cloud Shell
   • Alibaba Cloud DNS