Billing.

How it works

A plan is just how much money you put in each month. Subscribe at any rung of the ladder, from $10 to $1,000, and every billing cycle exactly that much credit lands in your balance. Every box you own meters against that balance:

• Awake, a box costs its monthly price spread over a 730 hour month. A Small is $100 a month, so it bills $0.137 an hour.
• Asleep, it costs $0.0001 per GB hour of the disk your box actually has, which is what keeps your files, ports and processes exactly where you left them. A Small asleep for a whole month is about $22. A box that kept a bigger disk, sized down after growing or restored from a large snapshot, sleeps at that bigger disk's rate, and pays the same per-GB rate for the extra disk while awake.

Pausing is how you keep the money: pause from the dashboard, or switch on auto-pause per box and it drops to the sleep rate by itself once it has sat idle for the window you pick. prized ssh wakes it when you come back.

Metering runs by the second and is quoted by the hour. Unused credit rolls over, up to two months of your plan: when a cycle's credit lands, anything above that cap lapses (it shows in your activity as its own line). Credit you bought as a one-time top-up is protected from that trim for two months after buying it. If you find yourself brushing the cap every month, a smaller plan fits you better; there is nothing else to configure.

Each plan is priced to run one size around the clock: the $10 plan runs a Nano, the $100 plan a Small, the $1,000 plan an Extra Large. The credit is yours to spend on any mix, though: a $100 plan also runs a Medium for a working day plus a Nano that never sleeps.

Sizes and rates

Size	Specs	Disk	Awake	Asleep	Plan that runs it 24/7
Nano	2 vCPU / 2 GB	40 GB	$0.014 an hour	$0.004 an hour	$10 a month
Micro	2 vCPU / 4 GB	80 GB	$0.034 an hour	$0.008 an hour	$25 a month
Extra Small	2 vCPU / 8 GB	150 GB	$0.068 an hour	$0.015 an hour	$50 a month
Small	4 vCPU / 16 GB	300 GB	$0.137 an hour	$0.030 an hour	$100 a month
Medium	8 vCPU / 32 GB	500 GB	$0.342 an hour	$0.050 an hour	$250 a month
Large	16 vCPU / 64 GB	1 TB	$0.685 an hour	$0.100 an hour	$500 a month
Extra Large	32 vCPU / 128 GB	2 TB	$1.370 an hour	$0.200 an hour	$1,000 a month

The last column is both the most a box can cost in a month and the plan that runs it around the clock. A comparison against renting the same machine elsewhere is on the pricing page.

Choosing and changing the plan

Pick a plan during onboarding or from the dashboard's Billing page. Payment goes through Stripe Checkout, cards only, and the first cycle's credit lands before you are back on the dashboard.

You do not have to choose one up front. Signing up, installing the CLI and browsing the dashboard all work before you pay. Choosing a plan is also what starts your first box: the rung you pick is the size that runs around the clock on it, so there is no separate machine to configure. Every size after that is yours to create, resize and delete as you like.

Change the plan from the same page whenever you like:

• Upgrading bills the prorated difference immediately and lands it as credit right away, then the new amount bills from the next cycle. Need more compute today: upgrade, and the money is spendable within a minute.
• Downgrading changes what the next cycle bills. Nothing is taken back; this cycle's credit stays yours.
• Cancelling stops the plan at the period's end. Credit already landed keeps working until it is spent.

The Billing page leads with the two numbers that matter: what is in the account, and how long that lasts at your current burn, the balance divided by what the fleet is costing right this second. That answer is exact, and optimistic when the fleet happens to be asleep: wake everything up and the runway shortens accordingly.

If your live boxes all fit a smaller plan, the page says so right above the picker, with the plan that covers them. Downgrading is never penalized: it changes what the next cycle bills and takes nothing back.

Topping up

Burned through a cycle early and don't want a bigger plan? If you've switched overage on, you don't have to do anything: usage past your credit just bills with the next invoice. Otherwise, add credit once from the Billing page: pick an amount from $10 to $250, pay by card, and the money is in your balance before you are back on the page. A top-up never changes what your plan bills; it is simply more credit in the same balance, spent by the same meter. If it keeps happening, upgrading the plan is usually the better deal, and the create and resize flows will already be suggesting it.

When we tell you

A prepaid balance goes down quietly between cycles, so three things watch it for you:

• The dashboard shows a banner on every page once there is less than two days of credit left at your current rate, a different one while you are in overage, and a third if boxes have been suspended.
• prized status prints a credit line when the balance is running low, so you see it without leaving the terminal.
• Email: twice on the way down, once when you are at a quarter of what the last cycle left you and again at a tenth; once when your balance crosses into overage; and once if boxes are ever paused. If your plan's payment fails, you get a mail for that too. Every one of them links straight to your billing page.

If you signed up and never started a plan, you may get at most two reminders about it, and then nothing further.

Overage

Overage is off by default: out of credit means boxes pause, and nothing ever bills past what you put in. Flip the switch on the Billing page and running out of credit stops nothing instead. The meter keeps billing past zero at the same hourly rates, and the amount below zero is your overage: it is added to your next invoice automatically, as its own line beside the plan, and collected in the same charge. No markup, and prepaid credit (your plan's drop, or a top-up) always spends first. Turn it off again any time and the balance is the hard stop once more.

With it on, you will know when it happens: the dashboard shows an overage banner, the balance on the Billing page reads negative with the exact figure, and we email you once when you cross. If you would rather not carry overage into the invoice, a top-up or an upgrade lands credit immediately and pays it down on the spot.

Two things end overage's grace on their own: a failed payment and a cancelled plan. If a cycle's charge does not collect, overage pauses with it — the balance becomes the hard stop again until a payment goes through. And if your plan ends while the balance is negative, the outstanding overage bills once, on a final invoice against the same card.

Running out

With overage off (the default), and always without a plan or while a payment is failing, the balance is the hard stop: when it reaches zero, boxes suspend. They are not deleted:

• Disks are kept, so your work, your installed tools and your git state are all still there.
• A plan's next cycle, an upgrade, or a one-time top-up starts them again from the dashboard. We never start them for you, because we will not spend your money on your behalf.
• Suspended boxes keep metering their disk at the sleep rate, which is what a stopped box actually costs us. With overage off, usage the balance cannot cover is written off rather than turned into a debt.

Nothing is deleted automatically. A balance that stays empty for a long time puts the account on a reclaim list we work through by hand, and we contact you before any disk is released.

Starting and resizing boxes

A create, a wake or a resize needs enough balance to run the resulting fleet for four hours. It is not a charge; it is a check, so a box that starts is a box that will still be there after lunch. If the check refuses, the message says exactly what the fleet would burn and what the balance would have to be.

Resizing takes effect from that moment on, at the new rate. The plan does not care which boxes spend its credit. If a size-up would make your fleet cost more around the clock than your plan puts in each month, the resize dialog says so and offers the covering plan as one extra click, quoting the exact amount your card is charged today: the prorated difference bills immediately and lands as credit right away, then the box resizes. It is only an offer; you can always just resize and spend the balance down faster.

Creating a box works the same way, with the default flipped: when the new box would outgrow your plan, the create form pre-selects the covering plan and the button reads "Create and switch to $X/mo". Uncheck the offer to create the box on your current plan. Either way nothing charges without the page saying so first, and the prepaid balance stays the only thing that actually gates a box.

If you have no plan yet and nothing left to spend, the same spot offers your first plan instead: the button takes you through checkout, the first cycle's credit lands during the redirect, and you come back to the form with your shape still selected, one click from the box.

Failed payments

If a cycle's payment does not go through, nothing is suspended by the failure itself: no credit landed, so the balance simply is not refilled and boxes keep running on what remains. The failure does switch overage off, though — a card that just bounced is not one to keep billing against — so from there the balance is the hard stop until a payment collects. Stripe retries the card on its own schedule, the dashboard shows a banner, and we email you once. Update the card in the Stripe portal, linked from the Billing page, and the charge retries on its own.

Money that goes the other way is symmetrical: a refund we issue, or a payment your card issuer pulls back (a dispute), takes the credit it bought back out of the balance, and a dispute also pauses the plan's billing until it resolves.

Receipts

Every cycle produces a Stripe invoice you can download. The Billing page lists recent activity: each cycle's credit and one usage line per hour of metering. Card details, invoice history and receipts live in the Stripe portal, linked from the same page.

Custom plans

If the ladder does not fit — a startup deal, an amount between rungs, something bigger than the largest plan — email team@prized.dev and we will send you a link. Opening it shows your plan and subscribes you at that amount in one click; if you already have a plan, the same link moves it. From then on it behaves exactly like any other plan: the amount lands as credit every cycle, and you change or cancel it from the Billing page. Custom links expire after 30 days, so ask for a fresh one if yours has lapsed.