Plans and billing
Kiste is free during early access. How plans, prepaid credit, credit packs, auto-refill, an empty balance and parking will work.
Free during early access
Kiste is free while it is in early access, and billing is not switched on for any account. Prices aren't set yet; they will be on the pricing page before anyone pays. This page describes how billing will work, so there are no surprises.
The model: prepaid, per second
- You pay for running time. A running Kiste is metered by the second at the rate of its size. A stopped or parked Kiste costs no compute.
- Prepaid only. Usage is paid from a credit balance in your account. There are no bills after the fact for usage, and you can't run up a debt.
- Disk is metered but not charged at launch.
Your balance
Credit comes from two places:
| Credit | Comes from | Expires |
|---|---|---|
| Plan credit | A paid plan's monthly fee, granted in full as credit when the invoice is paid | At the end of that month's period |
| Purchased credit | Credit packs, auto-refill payments and the trial credit | Never |
Plan credit is used first. The console's Billing page shows the balance, the usage of the current and previous period by Kiste, the last wallet entries and your invoices.
Credit packs and auto-refill
- Credit packs are one-time purchases through Stripe Checkout.
- Auto-refill (opt-in, needs a saved card) buys the pack you choose whenever your balance falls below the threshold you set. It charges at most a limited number of times a day, and after a declined payment it waits until you update the card. Each charge raises an alert.
Payments, cards and invoices are handled by Stripe; Kiste never sees your card number. An API key can't start payments or change billing settings.
When the balance runs out
- New running time is refused at once: you can't start or create Kisten
(B-codes), and a
billing_wallet_emptyalert is raised. - Kisten that are running keep running for a 24-hour grace period.
- After it, running Kisten are parked: stopped with their session saved,
never deleted. A
billing_machines_parkedalert is raised. - Adding credit ends the state.
kiste startresumes a parked Kiste exactly where it was.
If a plan's payment fails, creating and starting Kisten is refused until it is paid; nothing is stopped or deleted.
Trial
New accounts start with trial credit and no card. On the trial, an account can have one Kiste of the default size, and an idle Kiste (no SSH connection, terminal or desktop viewer, and under a tenth of a CPU busy) is parked after 30 minutes so the credit isn't spent while nobody works.