# Billing

The rates are on [Pricing](/billing/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](/create/scaling#min-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](/platform/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](/create/scaling#min-instances) everywhere cold starts don't hurt.
- Serve frontends as [static builds](/platform/frameworks#frontend) - their bandwidth is free.
- Use [Shared-tier databases](/platform/databases#the-shared-tier) for previews and development.
- Let [stale previews clean up](/create/git-automation#remove-stale-environments) with their branches.

## Related

- [Pricing](/billing/pricing): Every rate, by the hour.
- [Scaling](/create/scaling): Instance-hours are a scaling decision.
- [Limits](/reference/limits): Trial and plan limits in one table.