Usage & billing
Naijacloud is prepaid. You add funds, your resources are metered hourly against that balance, and you can see the figure at any moment. There is no subscription, and no invoice waiting at the end of the month.
How it works
Five sentences cover the whole model.
You add funds to your workspace balance. Running infrastructure is metered hourly against that prepaid balance. Every workspace gets a free app, a free database and unlimited static sites. Nothing charges you for having an account, and nothing charges you for deploying. When you delete a resource, it stops costing money immediately.
There is no plan to choose and no card kept on file. Billing shows your balance, what a full month costs at your current configuration, and roughly how long the balance covers that.
What is metered
| Resource | Charged on |
|---|---|
| Applications | Memory and CPU you provisioned, per hour running |
| Databases | Memory, CPU and disk quota, per hour running |
| Cache | Memory and CPU, per hour running |
| Object storage | Bytes stored |
| Bandwidth | Data served out, beyond the monthly allowance |
| Preview environments | Memory and CPU, after the first 24 hours per pull request |
Every size and its price is on the pricing page, and the create form shows an estimate before you make anything.
Three consequences worth knowing.
- You pay for what you provisioned, not what you used. A service capped at 1 GB costs the same whether it sits idle or runs hot. That is deliberate. A bill that moves with how busy your app happened to be is a bill you cannot predict.
- A running service costs whether or not it is receiving traffic. A
devservice left up over a quiet month still accrues hours. Stop what you are not using. - Cron jobs are charged for the time they actually run. A job that takes 40 seconds a night costs about 20 minutes a month, not a month.
What is never charged
Deployments, redeploys and rollbacks. Build compute. Git integration. Custom domains and their SSL certificates. Environment variables and secret files. Creating projects, environments and teams. Inviting teammates. Logs and basic metrics. API and CLI access. Transfer between services in the same region.
We charge for infrastructure. We do not charge for using the platform.
The free tier
Every workspace can run these at no charge:
- One free app. A web service or cron job at the Free size (0.25 CPU, 256 MB). A free web service sleeps after 15 minutes without visitors and wakes on the next visit, in under a minute. Paid sizes never sleep.
- One free database. Any engine at the Free size, with a 1 GB disk.
- Unlimited static sites. Always free.
The limit is counted per workspace and per person, so opening a second workspace does not give you a second free app. Anything bigger than the Free size, or a second app or database, is metered from your balance.
Each month every workspace also gets 1,000 emails, 5 GB of object storage and 20 GB of egress before metering starts. These allowances do not accumulate: whatever is unused at the end of the month is gone.
Preview environments
Every pull request gets its own preview environment, and the first 24 hours are free. After that it draws from your balance at half the standard rate.
The free window belongs to the pull request, not to each deployment. Pushing more commits redeploys the preview. It does not hand out another free day.
We email you an hour before a preview starts costing money, and Billing shows a live countdown for each open pull request. When the pull request is merged or closed, the preview stops on its own and so does the charge.
Spending controls
Three settings, all on the Billing page.
- Low balance alerts. Tell us the figure to warn you at. You get one email when the balance drops below it, and the alert re-arms after you top up.
- Usage alerts. Get told when you reach 50%, 75%, 90% or 100% of your spending limit. These need a spending limit set, since a percentage needs something to be a percentage of.
- Spending limit. A monthly maximum. When you reach it, your protection policy takes over.
What happens when you run out
Preview environments stop as soon as your balance reaches zero. Paid apps and cron jobs stop after three days, and paid databases and caches after seven, unless you add funds. We email you before anything stops, with the date it will stop.
Free services and static sites are never stopped for an unpaid balance, and neither is object storage.
Stopping never deletes anything. A stopped database keeps its data, and a stopped app keeps its settings, domains and deploys. Add funds and everything we stopped starts again on its own, within the hour.
Nothing goes into arrears. Usage we could not charge is shown on your statement and written off. You will not be presented with a bill you did not agree to.
Adding funds
Add funds takes you to a hosted checkout. Pay by bank transfer or card, in Naira.
Your balance moves when the payment settles, not when you land back on the success page. A bank transfer clears in minutes, so give it a moment and the page updates.
Funds do not expire. Top-ups are not refundable to card, so add what you expect to spend rather than parking a large amount.
Automatic top-up
You can ask Naijacloud to prompt you when your balance drops below a figure you choose. Set the threshold and the amount. When you cross it you get a notification with a one-tap link to add exactly that amount.
This sends you a link. It does not charge a saved card. Naijacloud never takes money from a card without you completing a checkout, so a top-up always needs one tap from you.
Transaction history
Every movement on your balance is listed with the date, what it was for, the amount, and the balance it left behind. Filter by top-ups, usage, refunds or credits, and open any row for its reference.
Quote that reference (NC-TX-...) if you
contact support about a charge.
Statements
At the end of each month you get a statement: everything metered, what the free allowances covered, and what was taken. It is a record, not a demand. Every figure on it was already settled hourly.
Download it for whoever does your books.
Keeping the bill down
- Size services honestly.
devanduatrarely need production sizes. See Instance types & regions. - Delete what you finished with. Preview environments clean themselves up. Services you created by hand do not.
- Serve heavy assets from a bucket rather than baking them into a build.
- Keep traffic in-region. Transfer inside a region is free. Crossing between regions is not.
- Use a static site for a front end with no server logic. A static site has no instance to pay for.