Usage & billing¶
Sistemo Cloud billing is a prepaid wallet — no subscription, no monthly fee, no surprise bills. You start with €5 free credit (no card). Adding a payment method unlocks €30 total for the trial; usage draws it down as you run; you top up when you want more. Your balance is your spend cap: at €0, new machines are blocked and running ones pause until you top up.
Cloud plan¶
| Price | Prepaid — pay only for what you run |
| Trial | €5 free on sign-up (no card); add a card (no charge) for +€25 once = €30 total trial |
| Top-up | Min €10 via Stripe (payment processor only — usage is never reported to Stripe) |
| Trial limits | 1 machine · 1 vCPU · 1 GB RAM · 20 GB storage · 1 volume |
| After your first top-up | 5 machines · 8 vCPU · 16 GB RAM · 200 GB storage · 5 volumes — raised further on request |
Adding a card without topping up unlocks the €25 trial bonus but keeps the trial's limits — only a real top-up raises them.
Limits are checked independently: filling your storage blocks both a new machine and a new volume (both need disk), while filling vCPU blocks a machine but still lets you create a volume. GET /v1/quotas shows every limit alongside what you are currently using.
How metering works¶
Usage debits your balance continuously (prorated to the second):
| Metric | When it bills | Indicative rate |
|---|---|---|
| vCPU-hour | Machine running | €0.035 |
| RAM GiB-hour | Machine running | €0.012 |
| Storage GB-month | Volume / root disk exists (running or stopped) | €0.050 |
| Snapshot GB-month | Snapshot used bytes on disk | same as storage rate |
Live rates: GET /v1/billing/rates and the dashboard.
Example: a 1 vCPU / 1 GiB machine costs ≈ €0.047/hour while running, plus storage for its disk. €5 free ≈ 105 such machine-hours (≈ 635 at the €30 trial).
Stopped is cheap
A stopped machine keeps its disk but uses no compute — you only pay storage. Stop machines you're not using instead of leaving them running.
Top-ups¶
Dashboard → Billing → top up (min €10). Card is saved for later top-ups.
What happens at €0¶
- New machines blocked and running machines pause.
- Resources kept for a grace window: 3 days on free trial, 30 days after you've topped up. Top up any time to resume.
- After grace, idle €0 account resources may be deleted (we email before this).
- Storage may nudge the balance slightly negative; cleared on next top-up.
Controlling cost¶
- Close sandboxes when done (
with Sandbox() as sb:/await sb.close()). - Stop instead of recreate if you need state between runs.
- Delete volumes and snapshots you no longer need — they bill while they exist.
- Watch Billing for live balance and usage by resource.
Viewing usage¶
Dashboard Billing: balance, top-ups, cost chart. API: GET /v1/billing/usage, GET /v1/billing/balance, GET /v1/billing/usage/by-resource (read scope).
Self-hosting the open-source engine is free forever and has no cloud wallet — see Self-hosting (optional).