Alibaba Cloud has announced significant price cuts for its compute, storage, and database services, with a clear focus of slashing costs for its international customers.
The unexpected move follows similar offers for Chinese customers revealed in January, which saw price drops for users committing to long-term deals.
The Hangzhou, China-based company announced the changes on April 8, revealing hefty price cuts of up to 59% on core public cloud products using the company’s international data centers outside of the Chinese mainland.
Alibaba Cloud slashes prices for international customers
While specifics surrounding the discounts weren’t disclosed by Alibaba, a notable reduction was seen in the Object Storage Service (OSS) resource plan, where a one-year 500GB package dropped from $63 to $16.99.
Other discounts mentioned in the announcement disclosed one to three-year term lengths, suggesting that longer commitments are more likely to see cost savings.
The announcement coincides with a number of other AI products, including a service to manage large language model integration and operation, which the company says is “to lower the threshold of leveraging AI.”
Alibaba also disclosed that it would be extending its free monthly usage of Cloud Data Transfer Service to international customers, lifting the limit from 20GB to 200GB. Note that this isn’t the egress fee associated with migrating data away from Alibaba Cloud – companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have already removed their limits amid EU debates surrounding anticompetitive business practices.
With a clear intention to occupy a greater share of the international market – which is largely made up of the three tech giants mentioned above – Alibaba’s final revelation was that it would be introducing financial incentives to “bolster its international partnership network,” including an increase in the standard discount and commission rates for resellers and the removal of initial tier requirements and yearly commitments for resellers.
