Billing Overview

Billing Method

COS is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis as detailed below:

Free Tier

New users will receive a certain amount of standard storage provided by COS free of charge in six months after activating the COS service. For more information, see Free Tier.

The free tier is not applicable to other billable items such as standard_IA and archive storage usage, requests, and traffic.

Billable Items

Billable items in COS include storage usage, requests, data retrievals, and traffic as shown below:

Storage Usage Fees

COS offers three object storage classes for different access frequencies: standard storage, standard_IA storage, and archive storage. For more information, see COS Storage Type.

Storage usage fees are calculated based on the storage actually used by your data. The specific billable items and descriptions of such fees are as shown below:

Billing Restrictions

1. Standard_IA storage class: If the storage duration is less than 30 days, it will be calculated as 30 days. If a single file stored is less than 64 KB, it will be calculated as 64 KB; otherwise, it will be calculated as the actual size.
2. Archive storage class: This storage class is available in public cloud regions only. If the storage duration is less than 90 days, it will be calculated as 90 days. If a single file stored is less than 64 KB, it will be calculated as 64 KB; otherwise, it will be calculated as the actual size.
3. If you upload an object in standard_IA or archive storage class with versioning not enabled, COS will delete the existing object of the same name (if any), and in this case, storage fees will still incur for earlier deletion of the object.

Request Fees

Request fees are calculated based on the number of requests. You can use the APIs, SDKs or console to upload, download, query, or delete objects and do more, which are actually implemented by sending requests to COS.

Requests include read requests and write requests. The monthly unit prices are the same for different request types but vary by storage class. The more requests sent, the higher the fees. The billing details for requests are as follows:

Billing Restrictions

1. Both successful and failed requests are billable.
2. 10,000 requests serve as the smallest counting unit for request fees; therefore, if the number of monthly accumulated requests is below 10,000 it will be calculated as 10,000 requests, no matter whether a request succeeds or fails.
3. When archived data is read, the data is first restored to Standard storage class and then read there; therefore, the number of requests is counted in the Standard storage class.

Data Retrieval Fees

Data retrieval fees are calculated based on the amount of data retrieved. The larger the amount, the higher the fees. The specific billable items and descriptions of such fees are as shown below:

Billing Restrictions

Standard_IA storage and archive storage classes are for cold data. If you want to download and use objects in these two classes, you need to retrieve the objects first; therefore, fees will be incurred for both data downloads and data retrievals.

Traffic Fees

Traffic fees are calculated based on the accumulated traffic generated by storage data reads. The billing details for traffic fees are as follows:

• In the same region, Tencent Cloud products automatically communicate with one another over the private network and no traffic fees will be incurred. For more information on how to determine whether the Tencent Cloud private network is used for access, see Creating Request Overview > COS Access via Private Network and Public Network.
• Traffic generated by object downloads directly through object links and object browsing through static website access node is public network downstream traffic.
• After CDN acceleration is enabled, traffic generated by browsing and downloading COS data from client through the CDN accelerated domain name is CDN origin-pull traffic.
• Traffic generated by replication of data in a bucket in one region to another bucket in another region through the copy API or cross-region replication feature is cross-region replication traffic.

Traffic Trends

The figure below shows the traffic fees incurred by data transmitted from COS to end user with CDN acceleration enabled and disabled, respectively.

Billing Restrictions

1. When archived data is read, the data is first restored to Standard storage class and then read there; therefore, the traffic is counted in the Standard storage class.
2. CDN origin-pull traffic refers to the traffic generated by data transfer from COS to Tencent Cloud CDN edge server. If traffic is forwarded from a third-party origin server to COS, public network downstream traffic will be generated.

Billing Cycle

The billing cycle and sequence of the billable items in COS are as detailed below:

• At the time of bill settlement, the system will settle in the order of free tier > pay-as-you-go billing.
• By default, the system uses the pay-as-you-go billing method for bill settlement.

Relevant Links

1. For COS pricing in each billing method, see COS Product Pricing.
2. For more information on arrears processing in COS, data retention and purge schedule, and billing descriptions, see Arrears.
3. In the pay-as-you-go billing mode, you can estimate the usage and calculate the fees using the COS Price Calculator.