Billing & spend controls
This page is the operational detail behind pricing: what gets charged when, what the guardrails are, and what happens when something goes wrong. The design goal throughout is no surprises and no destroyed state — every automatic enforcement hibernates; nothing of yours is ever deleted to collect a bill, and pooled servers are never deleted, full stop.
Getting started: card first, €5 credit
Section titled “Getting started: card first, €5 credit”- A valid payment method must be on file before any cluster can start. There’s no charge until you start one, and no free trial — instead every new team gets a one-time €5 signup credit, which covers roughly 26 awake-hours of an HA cluster (or ~55 of Basic) on the hourly plan (as of 2026-07-09).
- The credit is consumed before your card is charged.
What a month’s invoice contains
Section titled “What a month’s invoice contains”- Flat plans (monthly / annual): one line per cluster, prorated from the day it started. Deleting a cluster mid-period ends its subscription immediately and forfeits the remainder of the period.
- Hourly (PAYG) clusters: awake hours, metered from the platform’s awake-time ledger. Partial hours round up; each active period bills a minimum of 4 hours (create and each wake start a period); hibernated time meters €0.
- Mid-period threshold charges: when accrued PAYG usage exceeds what’s already been charged by €25, we invoice immediately rather than letting a large month-end bill build up silently.
- Currency: EUR or USD, fixed at your first checkout. VAT is added automatically where it applies; EU businesses with a valid VAT ID are reverse-charged; outside the EU, PaaSbox serves businesses only.
Spend caps
Section titled “Spend caps”Every account has a hard monthly spend cap from day one — a runaway CI job or a scripting mistake can’t produce an unbounded bill:
| Cap | How you get it |
|---|---|
| €200 / month | every new account |
| €1,000 / month | after 2 cleanly paid monthly closes |
| €5,000 / month | after 6 clean closes and ≥ €500 total paid |
| Custom | by arrangement — contact us |
- Approaching the cap (around 80%) triggers a warning.
- At 100%, awake clusters are hibernated — never deleted. State, volumes, and pooled servers all survive, exactly as in a manual hibernation. Wake them after raising the cap or when the month rolls over.
If a payment fails
Section titled “If a payment fails”The dunning path is deliberately slow and non-destructive:
- Immediately: starting new clusters is blocked. Running clusters keep running.
- First days: the charge is retried automatically several times.
- After ~3 days unpaid: running clusters are hibernated. Nothing is deleted; your etcd state, volumes, and servers are intact. Paying the open invoice lets you wake them.
- After ~14 days unpaid: managed (on-demand) resources are deleted. Pooled servers are never deleted — even in dunning. They return to your fleet with their grandfathered price intact.
Cancellation & refunds
Section titled “Cancellation & refunds”- Monthly: cancel anytime; the cluster runs to the end of the paid period. No partial refunds — hour-precision exit is what the hourly plan is for.
- Annual: cancels to the end of the term. On request, we refund the remainder minus the months used at the monthly rate (annual = 10× monthly, so the refund reaches €0 at month ten).
- Deleting a cluster stops future charges for it; the current period is forfeit.
- EU consumers: you have a 14-day right of withdrawal; starting cluster provisioning means you consent to immediate performance and waive it once the service has begun. Outside the EU, PaaSbox is offered to businesses only.
The authoritative wording of these rules is the refund & cancellation policy and the terms of service. Questions about a specific invoice? Contact support — include the team name and the invoice number.
Design principles, stated plainly
Section titled “Design principles, stated plainly”- Hibernate, never delete. Caps and dunning suspend compute; they don’t destroy state. The only thing that deletes a cluster inside the payment flow is two weeks of non-payment — and even then, adopted servers survive.
- Meters are honest. PAYG counts hours your control plane was actually awake — not calendar time, not provisioning weirdness. If the platform hibernates you (cap, dunning), the meter stops too.
- Charges are bounded. Between the €25 threshold charge, the monthly close, and the spend cap, the gap between “what you’ve used” and “what you’ve been billed” stays small.