Credits
Last checked:Alibaba Cloud free trial: USD 90 (ECS)
creditscloudalibaba-cloud
Alibaba's international cloud platform, offering ECS virtual machines, databases, and AI services across global regions. Official site
Alibaba Cloud free trial, the facts
| Amount | USD 90 (ECS) |
|---|---|
| Grant type | Time-limited free trial |
| Expiry | ECS free credits valid for 3 months; solution trial points valid 1 year |
| Payment method required | Yes |
| Withdrawable as cash | No |
| What I ran on it | Not tested yet |
Good for
- Trying ECS virtual machines with a USD 90 budget over 3 months
- Structured product-by-product evaluation: each eligible product has its own trial
Not for
- GPU experiments: no GPU card appears in the free-trial catalog
- Paying with PayPal: it is not supported for trials
Alibaba Cloud international has no single lump-sum signup credit. The headline offer for compute is per-product: ECS comes with “USD 90 Free Credits (Valid for 3 Months)”. A payment method is required (Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, or JCB; PayPal is not supported for trials). All figures come from Alibaba Cloud’s official free trial pages, checked on 2026-09-02.
Correcting the $300 figure
Blog posts and credit roundups still describe a $300 lump-sum credit for new international Alibaba Cloud accounts. As of 2026-08-21 that is not the current official model. The official free page lists per-product trials instead, with the ECS USD 90 for 3 months as the compute-relevant one. Treat $300 claims as stale until Alibaba’s own pages say otherwise. Corrections like this are the reason this page exists; compare the same pattern in the DigitalOcean entry, where a widely circulated $200 figure is also absent from official pages.
How the trial system works
Two mechanisms run in parallel. First, per-product free trials: one trial per product, first use only. Second, solution trial points: 50 trial points once (1 point = USD 1), plus 5 more per solution up to another 50. Points are isolated to trial accounts and valid for 1 year. Points and per-product trials are separate pots; neither is a general account credit.
GPU status
No GPU card appears in the free-trial catalog, so there is no official free GPU path on Alibaba Cloud international. If free GPU access matters, no hyperscaler trial on this site currently offers it directly; see how to choose between a VPS, GPU cloud, serverless, or a sandbox for platforms built around GPU access instead.
Enforcement fine print
One identity across accounts: the first-use rule applies per person, not per account. Instances that become ineligible are stopped or locked, and released after 15 days. Do not park anything you care about on a trial instance past its window.
What I have done with it
Not tested yet. This page reports only what the official pages state.
Choose Alibaba Cloud if you specifically want to evaluate ECS with a defined USD 90 budget; skip it if you expected an account-wide credit. For lump-sum alternatives, see the Oracle Cloud free trial and the AWS Free Tier credits. Every grant I track is on the credits index.
What changed here
Added Alibaba Cloud: USD 90 (ECS).
Plus 1 recheck that found nothing changed. Every row links to the full record on the changelog, with the official page it was checked against.
Related entries
AWS: up to $200
Oracle Cloud: US$300
Google Cloud: $300
Sources
Last checked:All numbers on this page come from the official pages above, checked on the date shown. If a figure is not stated there, this page says "Not stated officially" instead of guessing.