Cloud docs
Billing
How a subscription is charged, when changes take effect, and what happens when an invoice goes unpaid.
Everything a project runs is on one subscription, billed to the team that owns it. The team's Billing page lists the subscriptions, the invoices and the card.
#The period
Monthly, quarterly or yearly, chosen when the project is set up.
| Period | Paid ahead | Notice to cancel |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | — | 3 days |
| Quarterly | 5% off | 10 days |
| Yearly | 15% off | 45 days |
Paying ahead is money the platform can plan capacity on, which is what the discount is for — and the notice period is the other side of the same trade. A month is small enough that a few days is fair warning; a year is a commitment planned around, and unwinding it takes longer.
The period is fixed for the term. It is what you agreed to and have been invoiced under, so on a card subscription it changes at renewal rather than in the middle. The Commercial terms dialog shows it and refuses it, rather than leaving you to wonder where it went.
Premium support and the Premium uptime SLA are sold on a quarterly or yearly period only. A monthly project is shown them and told why they are not available until the period changes.
#Changing something mid-term
Everything else is changeable whenever you like: support, the uptime promise, the environment count, extra bandwidth, the CDN and its network, the number of domains, how many people are on a project, and production's backup schedule. Resizing a machine or buying a disk counts too.
Taking more is always immediate and always prorated. You are charged for the part of the period you actually use it, rather than for a whole month you were halfway through. Raise the environment count on the 10th and you pay for two-thirds of that month and can use it that afternoon.
Giving something back is not the mirror image. With one exception, a reduction applies from your next invoice: you keep what you are giving up, and keep being billed for it, until the period you bought it for ends.
| Change | Takes effect | Credited now? |
|---|---|---|
| Resize a machine, up or down | Immediately | Yes, both ways |
| Buy a disk, or grow one | Immediately | n/a |
| A disk you already have | Not removable | — |
| Add environments, traffic, CDN, domains, people | Immediately | n/a |
| Reduce environments, traffic, CDN, domains, people | Next invoice | No |
| Move the CDN to the cheaper network | Next invoice | No |
| Lower support or the uptime SLA | Next invoice | No |
Three of those need a reason.
Resizing is the one thing credited both ways. A machine holds nothing that is not also somewhere else, so its size can move freely and the money moves with it — down as well as up. That is only true while the disk stays put, which is why not every machine can go down: see Resizing a machine below.
Everything else churns, so reductions wait. What you buy is capacity for a period — "two environments beyond production", "a terabyte of traffic", "four people on this project". Feature-branch environments are made on Monday and gone by Thursday; people join a project for a sprint. Crediting each change would mean rewriting your subscription continuously for numbers that end the week where they started. So you can lower any of them whenever you like, it is recorded, and it takes over at your next invoice — and raising the number again before then simply cancels the reduction.
This is also why deleting an environment costs nothing and refunds nothing. What you bought is the slot; the environment is what fills it. Delete one and the slot stays yours, ready for the next. Lowering the count is the separate decision that changes the money.
A disk cannot be given back. Storage is grown, never shrunk — the data on it is the reason it exists, and a disk that could be removed is a disk that could take a database with it.
Adjustments appear on the next invoice rather than as a separate charge.
#Resizing a machine
Which way a machine can move depends on its disk — see Machines for the two kinds.
A Cloud Native machine has a disk of its own, so a resize changes CPU and memory and leaves the disk alone. It goes both ways and is credited both ways, so it is the one to reach for when a site is busier in December than in February. Growing is done without taking the site down where the provider allows it — the machine keeps serving while it gets bigger. Shrinking always needs a restart: memory cannot be taken back from a running kernel, so the machine is stopped, moved down and started again. You are told which of the two is about to happen before you confirm.
A Regular machine has its disk as part of its type, so moving it up grows the disk with it — and storage cannot be shrunk. That makes it a one-way door: the list offers only the size it is on and larger, and the machine is always stopped, moved and started again. It is charged prorated from the day you take it, like everything else you add.
Growing the disk grows the filesystem on it too, so the room is there when the machine comes back. Worth saying because it is the step people miss doing this by hand: a disk that is bigger while the filesystem still reports the old size looks exactly like nothing having happened.
Preview environments work differently. They do not have a machine each:
staging, development and every feature branch share one machine, and that is
what is resized. It is offered only the machines sold for this — the short
VC-PRE-… list — and resizing it gives every environment on it more at once.
That list is a range rather than one machine per size. Several machines carry
twenty environments; what separates them is how much each of the twenty gets,
which is why every option says both. The name is the count and then which of
that size's machines it is, cheapest first: VC-PRE-E20-0 is the cheapest
machine carrying twenty, VC-PRE-E20-1 the next one up, and so on. Pick further
down the list when the environments are rehearsing a large site, and at the top
when they are not. It can be moved to a smaller machine as well, but not one
that carries fewer environments than are running on it.
#Paying
By card, or by bank transfer where invoice terms have been granted — that is not something you switch on yourself, because it is credit.
Card details are entered at the payment provider and never reach this platform. Manage at Stripe on the billing page opens their portal, where the card, the receipts and the past invoices live.
#Free trial
Paying by card, a project whose machines come to €30 a month or less before tax starts with three days free. The configurator marks the machines that qualify and says in its summary whether the whole order does; add-ons such as support, uptime or extra environments are not counted towards the €30. A promotion code can give a trial on other terms — longer, or on larger machines — and says so when it is applied at checkout.
- The card is taken at checkout and charged when the trial ends. Cancel the project before then and nothing is charged: it runs until the trial ends, and is then deleted with its data and backups.
- One trial per person, and per card. Whoever orders, and every owner of the team, must not have had one before — from a code or not. A card or bank account that has already paid for a trial, under any account, ends the new one as soon as checkout completes: the site keeps running, and the first payment is taken straight away instead of after the free days.
- The project runs as ordered until the first payment. Nothing that raises the price can be changed during the trial: resizing a machine, growing a disk, moving a service onto a machine of its own, adding machines, or raising the commercial terms. Giving something back is allowed.
- If the first payment does not arrive, the site is taken offline a couple of hours after the trial ends and shows your offline page. Pay within three days — update the card in the billing portal — and it comes back on its own. After three days the project is cancelled, its machines are removed straight away and its data and backups are deleted with them — unlike an ordinary cancellation, nothing is kept for thirty days.
Paying by invoice there is no trial: the terms are agreed with us instead.
#Tax
Prices in the console are shown and stored net; the public price list shows them with Croatian VAT included, because that is the figure most of its readers will actually pay. Tax is worked out at checkout from the billing address on your team, so it is the tax you owe rather than ours: within Croatia and for EU consumers, 25%; for a business elsewhere in the EU with a verified VAT id, reverse charged and labelled as such; outside the EU, zero.
The billing address belongs to the team, so two people buying for one team cannot put two different companies on two invoices. Changing it applies to the next invoice and never to one already raised.
#An invoice that goes unpaid
Nothing is destroyed, and nothing stops serving.
Paying by invoice. The team's owner is mailed a couple of days before an invoice falls due, again when it passes its due date, and weekly after that. Three days past the due date the team is suspended. After a week it also opens a ticket on our side, because by then it wants a conversation rather than another reminder. The suspension is lifted when the invoice is paid.
Paying by card. If the payment provider's retries fail and the subscription ends unpaid, the team is suspended seven days after the subscription ended. It is lifted once the team has a way of paying again — a live subscription, or invoice terms we have granted.
Suspended means the same thing either way: everybody on the team is capped to Viewer. The sites keep serving and the backups keep running; what stops is changing things — deploys, provisioning and configuration.
#Cancelling
From the project, giving the notice its period asks for. The dialog quotes the date before you agree to it. Cancelling with more notice than that ends the subscription at the end of the current period; cancelling inside the notice window ends it at the end of the next one.
Your site keeps running until that date. You have paid for the period, so you keep what you paid for — cancelling on the second of the month does not take the site away that afternoon. Billing stops on the date quoted, the machines are destroyed a day after it, and the hostnames stop resolving then.
Everything written down survives. The project, its environments, their domains and the release history stay exactly as they are. The backups are kept for thirty days after the subscription ends, so the site can be brought back, and are then deleted from our storage — see Backups. A copy in your own storage is yours and is not deleted.
#Worked examples
Assume a monthly subscription that renews on the 1st.
Buying the project. You configure production, add one extra environment and a CDN commitment, and pay at checkout. The first invoice covers the whole first period; the subscription then renews on the 1st of each month for the same lines.
Adding an environment on the 10th. You raise the count from 1 to 2 in Commercial terms. Two-thirds of a month is charged for the new slot, and it appears on the 1st. You can set the environment up immediately.
A feature branch, 12th to 15th. You create an environment in the slot you already have and delete it three days later. Nothing is charged and nothing is credited — you were paying for the slot the whole time, and it is still yours.
Resizing a Cloud Native production machine up on the 14th, down on the 20th. Both are prorated, because a resize leaves the disk alone. The invoice on the 1st shows the charge for six days at the larger size and the credit for the rest of the month at the smaller one.
Moving a Regular production machine up on the 16th. The new size comes with a bigger disk, so half a month is charged for the difference and there is no way back below that size afterwards.
Removing an environment on the 20th. You delete the environment — its machine is destroyed there and then — and lower the count from 2 to 1. The count stays at 2 until the 1st, when the lower price takes over. The rest of that month is not credited: it is what you bought. Change your mind on the 27th and raising it back to 2 cancels the reduction entirely.
Dropping support from Premium to Standard on the 18th. Recorded, and applied on the 1st. You keep Premium response times for the rest of the month you have paid for.
Buying a 50 GB disk on the 22nd. A third of a month is charged for it on the 1st. It cannot be removed later, only grown.
Cancelling on the 25th of a monthly plan. Three days' notice, so it lands at the end of the month you are in. Billing stops on the 1st, the site keeps serving until then, and the machines go a day later. The backups are there for thirty days after the 1st.