Cloud Digest 2026-10-31: Year-end sales are live, token plans add more for the same price
Tencent Cloud's Double 11, Baidu AI Cloud's 11.11 and Alibaba Cloud's year-end server sale are live, with new-customer servers from CNY 38–39/year. Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud kept their Token Plan prices and added benefits and discounts instead. None of the 81 prices we track by script changed this time.
Prices and offers are for reference only. The provider's official page always prevails.
This issue covers October 2026. Everything below comes from the providers' official pages as of October 31. Most of the linked pages are in Chinese.
Highlights
- Year-end sales: Tencent Cloud's Double 11 and Baidu AI Cloud's 11.11 sale have started, and Alibaba Cloud's homepage is promoting its "affordable cloud" sale. Entry-level servers for new customers cost CNY 38–39/year, almost always limited to new users and limited stock.
- Token plans: Alibaba Cloud kept its personal Token Plan prices, added benefits, and runs a 60%-off night discount. Tencent Cloud added a Hy Token Plan series and Kimi-K3.1-Pro.
- New models: Alibaba Cloud Model Studio's October releases are mostly speech synthesis and image generation. Tencent's Hy4 preview is now available pay-as-you-go on TokenHub.
- Our data: we re-crawled 13 scripted price sources on October 31, and all 81 prices matched the previous crawl.
Year-end sales: entry servers under CNY 40
| Provider | Sale | Dates | New-customer entry server |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alibaba Cloud | Affordable cloud | Not stated | From CNY 38/year |
| Tencent Cloud | Double 11 | Not stated | LH Agent 4 vCPU / 4 GB from CNY 38/year |
| Baidu AI Cloud | 11.11 | Oct 20 – Nov 30 | 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 3 Mbps from CNY 39/year |
Alibaba Cloud
- New-user flash sales run twice a day, at 10:00 and 15:00. The flash-sale item is a Simple Application Server with 2 vCPU / 2 GB and 200 Mbps peak bandwidth, and the page advertises "cloud servers from CNY 38/year".
- The "99 Program" has been extended. It sells an ECS 2 vCPU / 2 GB with 3 Mbps unmetered traffic for CNY 99/year at the same price for new and existing users, with no renewal increase, and the price is "locked until 2029".
- Our comparison tracks the non-flash-sale prices: CNY 68/year for the 2 vCPU / 2 GB Simple Application Server and CNY 99/year for the ECS. See the budget server comparison.
Tencent Cloud
- The sale banner reads "LH Agent 4 vCPU / 4 GB from CNY 38/year for new customers". The server section lists 4-vCPU Lighthouse from CNY 109/year for new users, the same price as in our comparison, and CVM Fengchi first orders from 73% off.
- Flash sales run daily at 10:00 and 15:00. Storage is up to 51% off, databases up to 65% off, and audio/video up to 37% off.
- Renewals: the 2 vCPU / 4 GB 5 Mbps and 6 Mbps Lighthouse plans renew at the purchase price and get a free upgrade to 4 vCPU / 4 GB. A separate section offers "buy 1 year, get 3 months free" on servers.
- Vouchers: a 4-voucher personal pack worth CNY 1,910 and a 4-voucher pack worth CNY 4,580 that both individuals and businesses can claim. All of them have minimum spends.
- Two-person group buying opens on November 1. A completed group earns extra service time or vouchers.
- Most sale prices are only shown after you log in.
Baidu AI Cloud
- From October 20 to November 30, top-ups earn vouchers. A top-up of CNY 5,000–9,999 earns CNY 1,088 for individuals or CNY 1,588 for businesses. The top tier, CNY 58,888 and up, earns CNY 18,588 or CNY 23,588.
- Voucher packs: CNY 1,155 for new users and CNY 11,000 for business users, both with minimum spends.
- Businesses that complete real-name verification get CNY 150 of free cloud server credit. New Qianfan users get a CNY 20 voucher.
- A 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 3 Mbps cloud server costs from CNY 39/year, for new users only and while stock lasts. Baidu AI Cloud is not in our budget server comparison yet.
Tencent Cloud International
- Promotions page: Lighthouse for new users from $1.68/month for the first month of 2 vCPU / 2 GB, which matches our comparison. CVM 1-year plans are up to 45% off.
- TokenHub offers 14 models, including Hy4 preview, Hy3, DeepSeek-V4-Pro/Flash, Kimi K3.1 and GLM-5.2, with 1M free tokens per model.
- Tencent Cloud Day takes place in Singapore on November 3, with a livestream you can register for.
The CNY 38–39 tier is almost always new users only, one order per customer and limited stock, and renewals usually go back to list price. If you plan to keep a server, compare Alibaba Cloud's "99 Program" and Tencent Cloud's "renew at purchase price" plans instead.
Token plans: same prices, more included
Alibaba Cloud Token Plan (Qwen AI platform)
- The four personal Token Plan tiers keep their prices: Lite CNY 39, Essential CNY 79, Standard CNY 139 and Pro CNY 499 per month (list prices CNY 60 / 120 / 180 / 600). These match our data.
- Personal plans gain 12 "Harness" benefits, which are agent tools such as web search and knowledge retrieval. Usage beyond the plan quota is billed at 12% off.
- Night Plan: every night from 22:00 to 08:00 Beijing time, Qwen3.8-Max costs 60% less for Qoder, Meoo and Token Plan users, with no sign-up needed. In the Token Plan model list, qwen3.8-flash also carries the 60%-off night rate, and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and some others carry a 50%-off night rate.
Tencent Cloud Token Plan
- Personal Token Plan list prices are still CNY 39 / 99 / 299 / 599 per month. The Double 11 page says "from CNY 28/month" but doesn't say which plan or conditions that price applies to, so check the order page.
- A new Hy Token Plan series is built around Hy4 preview. It shares one API key with the general Token Plan, and usage is deducted from whichever plan covers the model you call.
- Kimi-K3.1-Pro is now available.
- October's credit discounts ended on October 30 at 12:00. They included 40% off Auto, 25% off Kimi K3, 45% off GLM-5.3 and 30% off GLM-5.3-Flash. The Double 11 page still shows "GLM-5.3 45% off for a limited time".
- Hy4 preview on TokenHub costs CNY 6 per 1M input tokens and CNY 18 per 1M output tokens (Guangzhou region), and it's included in our token plan comparison.
Baidu AI Cloud, Z.ai
- Baidu Qianfan's Token Plan had no changes this period.
- The latest entry in Z.ai's release notes is still GLM-5.3-Flash from August 26, and its pricing page matches our data.
New models and products
Alibaba Cloud Model Studio: October was mostly speech and image models
These releases come from Model Studio's new models page. "Beijing" means the China North 2 (Beijing) region.
| Date | Model | What it is | Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10-02 | qwen-image-2.1-pro | Text-to-image and image editing with transparent layers and up to 10 reference images | Beijing |
| 10-09 | qwen-image-2.1-turbo | Open-source image generation and editing, tuned for cost | Beijing |
| 10-12 | qwen-audio-3.1-tts-flash | Low-latency streaming speech synthesis | Singapore |
| 10-17 | deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017 | Updated DeepSeek V4.1-Flash, 1M context | Beijing, Singapore |
| 10-19 | xiaomi/mimo-v2.6-pro-ultraspeed | High-speed MiMo-V2.6-Pro | Beijing |
| 10-21 | qwen-audio-3.1-tts-plus | Multilingual and dialect speech synthesis with noise-robust voice cloning | Beijing, Singapore |
| 10-21 | MiniMax/MiniMax-M3.1-Flash | Multimodal model for agent tasks, 1M context | Beijing |
| 10-22 | qwen-audio-3.1-tts-next | Generates speech, sound effects and ambience in one pass | Singapore |
| 10-27 | qwen-audio-3.1-realtime-flash | Real-time full-duplex voice chat | Beijing, Singapore |
| 10-27 | Tripo series (10 models) | 3D generation, texturing, segmentation, rigging and more | Beijing |
| 10-29 | antdigital/Ling-3.1-flash | Hybrid-reasoning text model, 1M context | Beijing |
qwen-audio-3.1-tts-plus is already in our TTS API comparison. Prices for the other new models aren't tracked yet.
Other updates
- Alibaba Cloud: OSS Agent is now generally available (October 28), adding billing and usage analysis, A2A and IM integration. AI Gateway added four capabilities (October 26): smart routing, end-to-end observability, AI FinOps and serverless pay-as-you-go billing.
- Tencent Cloud: 9th-generation CVM is advertised as "over 30% faster" in China. The international site says 41%.
- Baidu AI Cloud: the headline of its October product news is the general availability of API Gateway Dedicated Edition, which manages traditional API and AI traffic together.
Our price data
On October 31 we re-crawled 13 scripted price sources from Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Tencent Cloud International, Baidu AI Cloud and Z.ai, and all 81 prices matched the October 30 crawl. Prices from promotion pages, such as budget servers and Tencent Cloud's Token Plan, are entered by hand. During the sales, the promotion page is the authority.