How metering works - instance-hours, build minutes, bandwidth, scale to zero, trials, spending limits, and team member billing.
Billing
The rates are on Pricing; this page is how they turn into a bill.
Metering#
Infrastructure is metered by the hour as it runs, with a minimum charge of one hour per resource.
- Containers are billed per instance-hour. If your app auto-scales to three instances for an hour, that is three instance-hours.
- Databases are billed for the tier and storage while provisioned - a database is "running" from create to delete.
- Build minutes are metered per deployment, with a minimum of one minute. Failed builds meter their minutes too.
- Bandwidth is metered on container traffic at $0.12 per GB. Static site bandwidth is free.
Scale to zero#
Container apps default to zero minimum instances. Billing starts when the app scales up and stops when it scales back to zero, so an idle app is not billed. This is what makes many preview environments cheap. Projected monthly cost is based on how much the app actually runs, not on a full month of uptime. Apps with a minimum of one instance are billed around the clock.
A worked example:
- An API on Small that serves traffic 6 hours a day: about 180 instance-hours a month, roughly $13.
- The same API always-on (min instances 1): 730 instance-hours, roughly $53.
- Its preview environments, visited a few minutes per review: effectively $0.
Free trial#
The trial runs for 30 days. No card is needed for the first two weeks; add a payment method by day 14 to keep going, and at day 30 the trial converts to normal billing. During the trial the billing page shows what your usage would cost - nothing is charged.
Trial limits:
- Up to three resources in any combination of containers, databases, and static sites
- Nano and Micro containers, with scale to zero required
- Shared or Dev database tiers, up to 10 GB of storage
- 10 GB of static site storage and 50 GB of bandwidth
- No high availability
Spending limits#
Set a monthly spending limit and budget alerts in your billing settings. You are warned as spend approaches the limit, and the limit is enforced as a hard cap when reached.
Tip
Set the cap above your projected month by a comfortable margin. A hard cap that trips on a good-news traffic spike takes production down with it - the warning thresholds are the early signal to react to.
Team members#
Add teammates to your organization at a flat rate of $9 per user each month, including the owner. The rate is flat for the month, whenever a user is added or removed.
Keeping the bill down#
- Leave min instances at 0 everywhere cold starts don't hurt.
- Serve frontends as static builds - their bandwidth is free.
- Use Shared-tier databases for previews and development.
- Let stale previews clean up with their branches.