Pricing & billing
paasbox is an open-source CLI that gives you your own Gardener landscape; running one is free, see your own Gardener. This page is about the clusters I run for people who would rather not run a landscape. They are a courtesy for people who ask, run by one person on a best-effort basis, not a product built to scale.
Those clusters are charged per cluster, and there are two kinds of cluster. The overview with the savings estimate is at /pricing/; this page is the price table plus the billing mechanics. What each kind of cluster includes is on what’s included.
The ladder
Section titled “The ladder”All prices exclude VAT (as of 2026-09-06):
| Cluster | Control plane | Monthly | Annual (pay 10, get 12) | Hourly (pay-as-you-go) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test cluster | one etcd, one API server | €49 / $65 | €490 / $650 | €0.15 / $0.20 per awake hour, never more than the monthly price |
| Production cluster | three etcd members, three API servers; a platform node can fail without a pause | €99 / $129 | €990 / $1,290 | – |
- No per-node fees, no user limits, no hidden costs. The fee covers everything we operate: the control plane, provisioning, upgrades and backups, lifecycle management, hibernation, and the console.
- Test versus production changes the control plane’s failure tolerance and whether the cluster carries a monitoring stack. Your workloads run on your worker nodes either way. A control-plane restart pauses management (deploys, scaling), not the apps already running.
- Annual is pay 10, get 12: two months free against the monthly rate, for one-year terms on both kinds of cluster. Test clusters can also run hourly.
- Hourly pay-as-you-go, on test clusters, counts awake hours only: €0.15 per hour, partial hours round up, each active period bills a minimum of 4 hours, a hibernated cluster meters €0, and a month never exceeds the €49 monthly price. It is the right plan for intermittent use; clusters that run all the time are cheaper monthly.
The included footprint
Section titled “The included footprint”The flat price covers a standard footprint per cluster: up to 10 worker nodes, about 500 pods, about 50 attached volumes, the same for both kinds of cluster. Larger clusters add a footprint step to the fee after a short review; a limit never affects anything that is already running. See limits & fair use.
What’s separate: your Hetzner bill
Section titled “What’s separate: your Hetzner bill”Your worker nodes, load balancers, volumes and, on a private cluster, the NAT gateway are in your own Hetzner project, and Hetzner bills you for them directly, at your own rate. paasbox never resells you compute. See grandfathered pricing for what keeping your pre-increase rate is worth.
How billing works
Section titled “How billing works”- Card up front, €5 signup credit. A valid payment method must be on file before a cluster can be created; that is what lets us run your control plane without it ever running unpaid. A one-time €5 credit per team covers your first days; there is no charge until you start a cluster, and no free trial.
- Per cluster, prorated. Each running cluster is one line on your subscription. Start one mid-month and you pay for the days it ran.
- Currency is fixed at first checkout. Pick EUR or USD the first time you pay; the account stays in that currency.
- Mid-period charges on hourly. When accrued pay-as-you-go usage reaches €25 above what has already been charged, we invoice immediately instead of letting a large bill build up until month-end.
- Changing the kind of cluster. A test cluster cannot become a production cluster in place, or the other way round; the control-plane shape is set at creation. Create the other kind and move your workloads; adopted servers move with you.
- VAT. Prices exclude VAT; it is added automatically based on your country. EU businesses with a valid VAT ID are reverse-charged. Outside the EU, paasbox is offered to businesses only.
Hibernation and the fee
Section titled “Hibernation and the fee”- On hourly, a hibernated test cluster costs €0; the meter only counts awake hours. Waking it starts a new active period (4-hour minimum).
- On monthly and annual, the flat fee keeps running while a cluster is hibernated. The plan reserves your control plane’s slot, and the cluster’s state and volumes are kept. If a test cluster is hibernated most of the time, hourly is the cheaper plan.
- Hibernating reduces the Hetzner side of the bill: on-demand worker nodes are deleted and your pooled servers are released back to your fleet, never deleted. Volumes and pooled servers keep billing at Hetzner.
- Delete a cluster you no longer need; the charge stops, prorated, and adopted servers stay yours.
Spend caps
Section titled “Spend caps”Every account has a monthly spend cap from day one, so a script gone wrong cannot produce an unbounded bill. Caps rise with billing history:
| Cap | When |
|---|---|
| €200 / month | every new account |
| €1,000 / month | after 2 cleanly paid months |
| €5,000 / month | after 6 cleanly paid months and €500 total paid |
| Custom | by arrangement, contact us |
Approaching the cap warns you; at the cap, awake clusters are hibernated, never deleted. Raise the cap or wait for the month to roll over, then wake them.
If a payment fails
Section titled “If a payment fails”- New cluster starts are blocked immediately, and Stripe retries the charge over the next days.
- After roughly 3 days unpaid, running clusters are hibernated (your data and configuration stay intact).
- After roughly 14 days unpaid, managed (on-demand) resources are deleted. Pooled servers are never deleted, not even in dunning. They return to your fleet, keeping their grandfathered price.
Cancellation & refunds
Section titled “Cancellation & refunds”- Monthly plans cancel anytime and run to the end of the paid period, with no partial refunds; the discount versus hourly is what you get for the period commitment. If you want to exit a test cluster to the hour, use hourly.
- Annual plans cancel to the end of the term. On request, we refund the unused remainder minus the months used at the monthly rate (annual = 10× monthly, so the refund reaches €0 at month ten).
- Deleting a cluster mid-period ends its subscription immediately and forfeits the remainder of that period.
- EU consumers have a 14-day right of withdrawal; by starting cluster provisioning you consent to immediate performance and waive it once the service has begun. Outside the EU, paasbox is offered to businesses only.
The standalone refund & cancellation policy and the terms of service are the authoritative versions of these rules.
Fair use
Section titled “Fair use”The flat price assumes the standard footprint above. Fair use makes that explicit. Exceeding a limit leads to a conversation, not an outage: we show it when you configure a cluster and block only the specific over-limit action, never the running cluster. The limits, and the reasons for them, are on limits & fair use.