Pricing and billing

These are planned prices and may change before the beta opens. Prices are for Bitcoin credit; there is no card price. You top up prepaid credit, and computers are billed per second from it.

Sizes and prices

Disk columns describe the capacity at creation, not an entitlement to expand or shrink a disk on resize.

The monthly cap. Each computer's charges for compute and for its own disk and saved memory stop at its cap for the calendar month (UTC). Rules:

• One counter per computer per month, shared by both modes.
• The cap is that of the largest size held so far that month. A higher cap starts only when a resize finishes; earlier time is never back-charged, and the monthly counter never resets.
• GET /computers/{id} shows month_to_date with accrued_usd, cap_usd and cap_reached.

Two modes

• On-demand (default): billed per second while the computer is running, from the moment it is reported running until it is reported in any other state. Boot time counts (about $0.001 per ac-2 start, estimate). While stopped or paused, its disk and saved memory are stored at $0.05 per GB-month of stored size, inside the cap.

  If a platform timeout, low-balance pause or spend-limit pause is late, compute charging for the affected running interval stops at the scheduled boundary, not at the later moment the pause completes. Always-on and storage charges are not waived by a spend-limit pause.

• Always-on: the cap spread over 730 hours ($13.50 ÷ 730 = about $0.0185 an hour for ac-2), charged in every state except deleted (and not at all while your balance is at zero), and never more than the cap in a calendar month. Its capacity is held for you, and it is started again after a restart. A slot released for low balance is not restored automatically: unreserved always-on and own-storage charges stay paused until you explicitly start or resume it (which needs capacity) or switch it to on-demand. Account-storage charges resume when retention clears.

Outside the cap

Outbound traffic is what leaves our network from your computers: their own connections, plus data API, preview, hook and desktop-viewer responses. Traffic between your computer and our gateway is not counted. Public images are never billed.

Examples

• Part-time development box: an ac-2 running 8 hours a day for 22 days = 176 h × $0.0288 = $5.07, plus its stored disk while stopped (at most $0.50 a month for a disk storing 10 GB). Well under its $13.50 cap.
• Running all month on demand: an ac-4 left running 730 hours would accrue $42.05, but stops at its $26.10 cap after 453 hours 7 minutes 30 seconds of billable compute, assuming no earlier own-storage charge. The rest of the month costs nothing more.
• Always-on agent: an ac-2 costs $13.50 per 730 billable hours, and at most $13.50 per UTC calendar month. An uninterrupted 30-day month costs $13.315068 before applicable credits.
• The quickstart: 15 minutes of ac-2 = $0.0072.

Topping up

• Amounts must be whole cents; sub-cent top-ups return 422.
• On-chain Bitcoin, $20 minimum.
• At most $250 per top-up in your first 30 days, then $1,000.
• Your posted paid-plus-promo credit plus outstanding invoices can total at most $2,000. One open invoice per account at a time; asking again returns the open one.
• Checkout runs on our Bitcoin checkout. The console says so before sending you there.
• On-chain: credit appears after the required confirmations (at least one; two or more above $250); invoices expire after 60 minutes. Always follow the checkout and the returned expires_at. Payments received or confirmed after expiry follow the late-payment review rules; expiry alone does not discard a payment. Partial and excess payments are reconciled under documented rules and can enter review status.
• Only new and processing invoices occupy the open-invoice slot. A review top-up remains unresolved. credited_* fields record the original credit, not net funds after a reversal; the ledger is authoritative.
• From code: POST /v1/billing/topups with {"amount_usd": "20", "method": "onchain"} and an Idempotency-Key returns a checkout_url. Agents can create the link; a person pays it. See Pay with Bitcoin and Billing API notes.

Watching and limiting your spend

• GET /billing/balance: balance, open charges, runway (projected time to zero, including stored disks, traffic and the cap resetting on the 1st), month to date and your spend limit. Also GET /billing/ledger, GET /billing/usage and GET /billing/prices. Usage windows cannot exceed 400 days and a future from is a 400.
• Money values carry a six-decimal USD string and an exactly equal integer micro-USD value. Use decimal or integer arithmetic rather than binary floating point.
• Monthly spend limit: pause or notify when reached. API keys can keep or strengthen the policy, not weaken it. Raising or removing a finite limit, or switching pause to notify, needs a fresh second-factor check in the console; an API request returns 403 forbidden_scope. The restriction clears at the next UTC month or when an authorized raise or removal satisfies the limit. Computers never start automatically afterwards.
• Per-key cost limit: max_running_cost_per_hour_usd refuses any create, start, resume, resize, snapshot or switch to always-on that would push the hourly cost of the key's computers over the limit. Relabeling or using child keys does not free a budget.
• To start or resume a computer, your balance must cover at least $1 or one hour of your projected spend, whichever is more.
• Charges are rated every minute for your balance and posted hourly to your ledger in whole micro-dollars, always rounded in your favour. balance includes open estimates; ledger balance_after is posted funds before open estimates. negative is a positive debt magnitude, not another amount to subtract.

When your balance runs low

The same retention clock applies when only stopped computers or account storage remain. A positive residual balance does not start that clock. Never-funded empty accounts get no retention clock or deletion notices. The same guarded clock covers private images, even without computers. Snapshots follow their source computer; private images survive ordinary source deletion. Quarantined private images cannot create new computers.

Never billed

• Capacity is shared and may occasionally be limited; limits we apply to protect the platform are never billed.
• On-demand computers are never billed in creating, stopping, pausing, restoring or error.
• Anything while your balance is at zero, until a credited top-up leaves positive available funds and clears low-balance retention.
• Inbound traffic, and public images.

Refunds and promo credit

Planned; final terms will be published before the beta opens.

• Unused paid credit from top-ups in the last 90 days can be refunded on request, after review, only to the address that paid; if that address cannot receive funds, the credit stays as service credit unless we decide otherwise after an identity review. Promo credit is never refundable.
• Approved Bitcoin refunds use the current exchange quote minus network fees, not the original top-up rate. Refunds are requested in the console and sent by us; there is no refund API.
• Credited top-ups have receipts that show the seller, your country, a tax line, the amount and rate, and your new balance.

Terms and policies, including the full credit and refund policy, will be published before the beta opens.

Dory is in development; these pages describe the planned service and may change. Questions: support@computeengines.com.