Does COS offer a free tier?

We provide new COS users with a limited free tier for STANDARD storage usage up to 6 months. For more information, see Free Tier.

How is COS billed?

A COS bill is broken down into 5 items: storage usage, requests, data retrievals, traffic, and administrative feature.

For information on billable items in COS and billing rules, see Billing Overview.

Why is my account still in arrears or incurs charges even if I am eligible for the free tier?

Possible reasons include:

1. Other billable items: COS fees are charged for storage, requests, data retrievals, traffic, and administrative feature. Currently, the free tier is only applicable to STANDARD storage, while other billable items will be billed as incurred in a pay-as-you-go manner.
2. Charges for excessive use of resources. For example, if you are entitled to 50 GB of free STANDARD storage, but your actual storage exceeds 50 GB, the excessive storage will be billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.
3. Expiration of the free tier. We provide new COS users with a free tier for STANDARD storage usage up to 6 months. Once the free tier expires, your storage will be billed pay-as-you-go. You can log in to the COS Console to view when your free tier expires on the Storage Package page.

How can I view the usage of my storage packs?

You can go to COS Console > Storage Package(https://console.cloud.tencent.com/cos5/package), and check when your storage packs take effect and expire, and how they are used.

Why is my account still in arrears or incurs charges even if I purchased a storage pack?

Possible reasons include:

1. Other billable items: COS fees are charged for storage, requests, data retrievals, traffic, and administrative feature. Currently, COS offers 5 storage packs: Standard, Standard_IA, Archive, Public network downstream traffic, and CDN origin-pull traffic, where:
   • The Standard storage pack is only applicable to STANDARD storage.
   • The Standard_IA storage pack is only applicable to STANDARD_IA storage.
   • The Archive storage pack is applicable to data transitioned to ARCHIVE through COS lifecycle and data that is directly uploaded to ARCHIVE.
   • The Public network downstream traffic storage pack is only applicable to public network downstream traffic.
   • The CDN origin-pull traffic storage pack is only applicable to CDN origin-pull traffic.

Other billable services, such as requests, data retrievals, and administrative feature, are all billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.
2. Fees in other regions:
- COS storage packs are purchased by region, and not shared among regions. For example, assume that you purchased a STANDARD storage pack universal in Mainland China (excluding Finance Cloud regions), and created a bucket in Singapore region, then this bucket is billed on its own, and ineligible for your storage pack.
- Currently, COS offers 2 storage packs: Universal-Mainland China ** and **Universal-Outside Mainland China. Either storage pack applies to the usage of resources only in the region you specify, outside which the resources usage is still billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. For regions, see Regions and Access Domain Names.

3. Charges for excessive use of resources. For example, if you have purchased a STANDARD storage pack of 100 GB, but your actual storage exceeds the total of your free tier plus 100 GB, the excessive storage will be billed in a pay-as-you-go manner.

How do I view my bill?

You can view information about the fees incurred by COS in the Billing Center in the console. For more information, see Viewing Billing Details.

Will fees be charged for requests and traffic generated by data transfer between COS and CVM?

There are charges for traffic when data transfer happens between COS and CVM from different regions, and no such charges if in the same region (free for data transfer over private network). For more information, see How to determine an access over private network.

All requests generated by data transfer between CVM and COS will be billed.

How is the public network downstream traffic in COS billed?

Public network downstream traffic is traffic generated by data transfer from COS to the client over the internet. Traffic generated by downloading an object directly through an object link or by browsing an object through a static website access node is public network downstream traffic. For more information on billing for such traffic, see Billable Items and Product Pricing.

Why is there public network downstream traffic after I enabled CDN acceleration?

It may be because you are still using the COS origin domain name formatted as <BucketName-APPID>.cos.<region>.myqcloud.com to access COS files after you enabled CDN acceleration. We recommend that you use CDN acceleration domain name instead, which only generates CDN origin-pull traffic.

How is the CDN origin-pull traffic of COS billed?

CDN origin-pull traffic is traffic generated by data transfer from COS to a CDN edge server. After CDN acceleration is enabled, traffic generated by browsing or downloading COS data in the client is CDN origin-pull traffic. For more information on billing for such traffic, see Billing Overview and Product Pricing.

Can I use multiple COS storage packs together?

Yes.

Will traffic fees be incurred by uploading a file to a COS bucket?

No.

Can I return a COS storage pack?

No, a COS storage pack takes effect upon purchase and cannot be returned.

Can I renew or upgrade my COS storage pack?

Yes.

Will traffic fees be generated when the Tencent Cloud products in the same region access each other?

Tencent Cloud products within the same region access each other over the private network by default, with no traffic fees incurred. For more information, see How to determine an access over private network.

If my account is in arrears and COS service is suspended, can I still access and download files via the COS Console?

If your COS service is suspended because your account is in arrears, you have no access to the console. Your data will be retained for 120 days. If you fail to top up your account to a positive balance within this period, your data will be terminated. For more information, see Arrears.