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Billing user guide

What you are charged for

Section titled “What you are charged for”

Compute, by the hour, by shape. That is the whole of it today.

ResourceBilled
Instance, per hourYes
Root diskIncluded in the instance price
Attached volumesNo
SnapshotsNo
Egress bandwidthNo
AddressesNo
API requestsNo

[!warning]

Unbilled is not free. Storage, snapshots and addresses are unrated because the rating configuration does not cover them yet, not because we decided to give them away. Closing those gaps will change bills. Do not build a cost model that assumes storage stays at zero.

Egress is different: it is deliberate. There is no egress line on the invoice and there is not meant to be one.

How a price is worked out

Section titled “How a price is worked out”

Nobody types a price in. For each shape:

  1. Find the cheapest current-generation instance at least as large at the reference cloud — never smaller, so the comparison cannot flatter us.
  2. Take its on-demand price in the reference region.
  3. Subtract 20%.
  4. Convert to euros at the published rate.

Burstable and ARM families are excluded from the comparison, because neither is equivalent: a burstable instance is not a fixed-core instance, and a different architecture is not the same machine. Including them would be picking the number that suits us.

The full rule, the exclusions and what happens to a shape with no equivalent: How prices are set.

The price you see is the price that bills

Section titled “The price you see is the price that bills”

Prices come from the same rating system that produces your invoice, read live. There is no second price list beside it that could drift.

You can read them without an account:

GET /v1/prices          the price of every shape
GET /v1/catalog         prices, plus whether each shape is in stock right now
GET /v1/prices/comparison   what the same machine costs elsewhere

Every comparison row carries its source URL, the date it was read and the method used — so a comparison we publish can be checked rather than believed.

When money moves

Section titled “When money moves”
MeteringHourly
AggregationSummed over the period
CollectionInvoice, 30 days to pay
CurrencyEUR

Card-on-file collection is a later phase; today you receive an invoice. You can add a card through the account settings, but that does not by itself switch you to automatic collection.

Small periods round down. A rated amount under half a cent for an hour bills zero — the period is still recorded, it just charges nothing.

Where to read it

Section titled “Where to read it”
  • The hosted billing portal — usage, invoices, payment method. There is no billing screen of ours; the account API hands you a link into the provider’s.
  • GET /v1/usage — what is running and what the month has cost so far. This is the only way to see cost before an invoice exists.

There is no cost explorer, no budget alert, no per-resource breakdown and no tag allocation.

What every account must hold

Section titled “What every account must hold”

A subscription on the metered price. Without one there is nothing for usage to attach to — it is recorded but never invoiced. Onboarding creates it, and finds an existing one before creating, so a past-due subscription is still your one subscription rather than grounds for a second.

Go further

Section titled “Go further”