Alibaba ESA and OSS Pitfalls
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Early Alibaba ESA claimed that traffic from ESA to private OSS was free, but later changed to:
When the origin is Alibaba Cloud OSS, OSS will charge based on back-to-origin outbound traffic. If the OSS region is not mainland China and the requested resources are transmitted to the corresponding region’s ESA node, no charge.
From previously free back-to-origin from any ESA node to OSS, changed to free back-to-origin from corresponding region ESA nodes to non-mainland OSS. That is, if OSS is in Korea, after enabling ESA, only Korean visitors access the hosted site for free; visitors from outside Korea will incur OSS back-to-origin traffic fee once per cache cycle. This fee was free until 2025.10, and started charging from 2025.11.
My small site used it for 9 months without charge, from the tenth month, i.e., 2025.11, this month’s CDN back-to-origin outbound traffic 11G, charged 0.8 USD.
Now I can no longer recommend Alibaba products as free, and Alibaba gave no notice, not even in-site messages. This shows their commercialization is very rough and disrespectful to users. Even I wouldn’t treat users like this with my own small SaaS product, no wonder they urgently require binding credit cards.
Latest Alibaba ESA billing details see: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/zh/edge-security-acceleration/esa/product-overview/basic-package-fee?spm=a2c63.p38356.help-menu-2673927.d_0_4_0.1f7e996f3LOyTd
Old docs can’t be found anymore. Since no charge for the previous nine months and current billing is clear, I confirm that ESA’s billing policy has changed.