Billing Mode

What billing method does COS use?

COS is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. For more information, see Billing Overview.

What types of usage will COS bill me for?

A COS bill is broken down into five items: storage usage, requests, data retrievals, traffic, and management feature. For more information on COS billing and pricing, see Billable Items and Product Pricing.

Free Tier

Does COS offer a free tier?

We provide all first-time COS users (both individuals and enterprises) with a limited free tier for STANDARD storage usage. For more information, see Free Tier.

Why does my account fall into arrears or incur 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 management 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. Excessive use of resources. For example, if you are entitled to 50 GB of free STANDARD storage, but your actual usage exceeds this limit, the excessive storage will be billed as incurred.
3. Expiration of the free tier. We provide first-time 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.

Traffic

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 a COS endpoint formatted as <BucketName-APPID>.cos.<region>.myqcloud.com to access COS files after you enabled CDN acceleration. We recommend that you use your CDN acceleration domain name instead, which only generates CDN origin-pull traffic.

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

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

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.

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

No, they won’t.

Will traffic fees be incurred when 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.

Bills

How do I view my bill?

You can view your COS bills through the Billing Center in the console. For more information, see Viewing Billing Details.

Arrears and Service Suspension

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

If so, you cannot read or write any data to COS. All you can do using the console is top up your account. For more information, see Arrears.