Billing and credit

Plany is prepaid. Your account holds a balance of credit, your plan adds credit each month, and what you run draws it down as it runs. There are no invoices for usage and no overage.

Plans

The plan's price is entirely spendable: it comes back to you as credit. A plan is a prepaid bundle rather than a fee on top of usage. Pro's usage discount is what makes it worth moving to before the included credit alone would.

Included credit is for the month it was granted and does not roll over. Credit you buy never expires, and plan credit is always spent first.

The Hobby free trial

An account's first subscription to Hobby starts with seven days free. The trial comes with the full $5 of credit, which you can spend as normal and which expires when the trial ends. Your card is taken at checkout and first charged $5 when the trial ends; from then on Hobby renews monthly as usual.

There is one trial per account: an account that has had a subscription before subscribes without one.

Pro, paid annually

Pro can be paid a year ahead: $200 a year instead of twelve payments of $20, and $25 of credit every month instead of $20. That is $40 less to pay and $60 more credit over the year — $100 of value in all. Everything else is the same Pro plan: spot, support and limits. Each month's $25 is granted at the start of that month and, as on monthly plans, does not roll over.

Switching from monthly to annual takes effect at once. Switching from annual to monthly takes effect at the end of the year you have paid for.

Subscribing and changing plan

Billing → Plans & prices → Subscribe (or Start 7-day free trial, or Pro's yearly option) → pay on the Stripe Checkout page

Once you are subscribed, the same page opens Stripe's customer portal, where you switch plan, update your card or cancel. An upgrade takes effect at once; a downgrade takes effect at the end of the month you have paid for. A cancelled subscription moves the account to Hobby's rates with no monthly credit.

Buying credit

Billing → Add credit → choose an amount → pay on the Stripe Checkout page

Payment is taken on Stripe's own page, so your card never passes through Plany. Any tax due is added on top, and the credit — the amount you chose, not including tax — reaches your balance as soon as the payment goes through. A saved card is offered again next time, so a later top-up is one click.

What draws credit

Compute is charged for what a workload reserves, per hour, metered to the minute. Pro accounts pay 5% less on all of it.

Egress is the line that most often surprises game hosting customers, which is why the first 25 GiB each month are free and the rate falls with volume.

What a server comes to

A game server's hourly price is its machine type's vCPUs and memory at the rates above. A standard-1 (1 vCPU, 2 GiB) is $0.030 an hour, and a standard-2 (2 vCPU, 4 GiB) is $0.060 — about $43.80 if it ran all month, and much less when it only runs while people play. Hobby's $5 runs a standard-2 for about 83 hours a month, roughly three hours a night. On spot, a standard-2 is $0.024 an hour.

Sandbox requests are deliberately cheap: a sandbox's real cost is the time its instances run. The request charge exists so that millions of tiny calls to a container that barely runs are not free.

Estimating before you run

ListPlans, ListSkus and EstimateCost need no sign-in, so you can work out what something will cost before you have an account. The console's Plans & prices tab has an estimator built on them.

When credit runs out

When your balance reaches zero, your account's workloads stop: running game servers are stopped (hibernated, where they have a snapshot policy), sandboxes scale to zero, and nothing new starts until you top up — creating or waking a server and creating a sandbox are refused with a link to Billing.

Your data is kept for 90 days. Worlds, schematics, builds, container images, secrets and saved terminal files all stay where they are, and we email you every week with the date they will be deleted. If the balance is still empty on that date, everything your account holds is deleted and cannot be recovered. Your account, its members and its billing history stay, so you can start again whenever you like.

Topping up any amount during those 90 days stops the clock: nothing is deleted, and your servers can run again. A top-up does not start anything by itself: players wake your servers by connecting, and you start the rest when you want them.

A spend cap (spend_cap on your billing account) stops workloads the same way but never starts the 90 days — your balance is not empty, and the cap lifts at the start of the next billing period.

Encore projects

An Encore project is funded differently: it spends only its own balance — credit its game's players bought, or credit you bought for that project — and never your plan credit or your account's credit. When its balance reaches zero its game servers stop, and a player connecting does not wake them until it is topped up. Nothing else on your account is affected in either direction.

The numbers worth watching

plany billing balance
plany billing costs

Reading your usage

In the console these are Billing → Overview and Billing → Statement. See the Billing API reference.

Who can do what