Usage and billing
MicroVMs bill through the same Cloud Service credit balance as instances, metered separately at a finer grain because a MicroVM can live for seconds rather than hours.
Before you begin
Section titled “Before you begin”- Cloud Service billing is enabled, with at least one currency configured. See Cloud Service.
- Plans have their prices set.
How usage is metered
Section titled “How usage is metered”A scheduled job pulls each node’s per-minute usage samples and records them against the owning account. Every 5 minutes, another scheduled job rolls up the fully-elapsed, not-yet-billed minutes for each account into a single charge and debits it from that account’s credit balance under the reason MicroVM usage.
For a plan with the Runner minute price (under Pricing on the plan form) set above 0, the charge is that price times the runner-minutes used (connector-launched runners only). Every other plan is charged the sum of its vCPU-second and MiB-second prices against the vCPU and memory actually allocated while running, so a MicroVM paused or idle-paused for part of an hour is not charged for the time it was not running.
What happens on a negative balance
Section titled “What happens on a negative balance”The same 5-minute job applies your Cloud Service balance policy once per account, then:
- Connectors are suspended (their jobs stop accepting new runner MicroVMs) the moment the balance crosses your configured suspension threshold, and resume automatically once the balance recovers.
- Always-on MicroVMs with HTTP ingress are stopped, never destroyed, the moment the balance goes negative. Their disk and configuration are kept; starting one again requires a positive balance.
Ordinary (non-always-on) MicroVMs are left to their own lifetime, idle-pause and on-timeout settings; the balance policy does not stop them directly.
What happens next
Section titled “What happens next”A stopped or suspended account recovers automatically once its balance is topped up past the threshold; there is no manual “resume” step for you to perform.
Common problems
Section titled “Common problems”- A customer is charged less than expected for a plan with a disk price set. Expected in this release: disk usage is not metered, so the plan’s Disk price never produces a charge. Price the plan’s vCPU and memory rates to cover disk cost until metering is added.
- A connector will not accept jobs even though it is enabled. The account’s balance crossed the suspension threshold;
billing_suspended_atclears automatically once the balance recovers. - An always-on MicroVM stopped itself. The account went negative while the MicroVM had HTTP ingress enabled. It stays intact and starts again once the balance is positive.