Billing and credits

Ankra Cloud bills by the hour and caps every resource at its monthly price. Prices are in euros and exclude VAT.

A card is required to create resources. Credits pay for usage first, but they never replace the card: an account without a default payment method cannot create servers or any other billed resource, whatever credit it holds. See Before you create resources.

How usage is metered#

• An hourly meter records one usage line per resource per clock hour (UTC) it existed in.
• A resource's hourly price is its monthly price divided by 730.
• A resource never costs more in a calendar month than its monthly price: that is the cap.
• A stopped server keeps billing: it keeps its disk and its addresses. Delete servers you no longer need.
• Days and months are UTC.

GET /v1/usage/summary shows the month to date, an estimate for the whole month and a per-resource breakdown; GET /v1/usage/billing-log has one line per resource per day. In the console these are Cost & usage → Summary and Billing log.

Server plans#

Plans come in three tiers: starter-* is Cost-optimized, cloud-native-* is Balanced and premium-* is Dedicated CPU. Every tier offers the same general-purpose sizes, two GiB of memory per core from 1 core / 2 GiB to 16 cores / 32 GiB plus a 1 core / 1 GiB entry size, so a server changes tier without changing size. Balanced costs more than Cost-optimized and less than Dedicated CPU at every size. Dedicated CPU also offers memory-optimised plans with four or eight GiB per core.

Balanced goes on sale on 24 October and Dedicated CPU is coming soon. Until then the console lists both tiers and does not offer their plans for new servers, Kubernetes node pools or edges, and new servers start on Cost-optimized at its cheapest plan. A server already on a cloud-native-* or premium-* plan keeps it and can change size within the tier.

Included storage follows one rule: the tier's rate times the larger of the memory in GiB and twice the cores. The rate is 10 GiB for Cost-optimized, 12.5 GiB for Balanced and 20 GiB for Dedicated CPU.

GET /v1/plans (or ankra-cloud plans list) returns the current catalogue with hourly prices. Every plan includes a public IPv6 /64. A plan change (POST /v1/servers/{id}/plan, server stopped) is billed from the next hour.

The IPv4 add-on#

A public IPv4 address costs €4.00 a month, billed for every hour it is held (resource_type: "public_ipv4"). The same price applies wherever one is held: a server, a network edge VM, a load balancer or a Kubernetes cluster's API endpoint. IPv6 is never a line item. Database VMs hold no public IPv4.

Everything else#

Inbound traffic, private-network traffic, private networks and routers without NAT are free. Storages and backups in error state are billed too, since their volume may exist; delete them to stop billing.

Credits#

A credit is an amount that pays for the usage your account incurs while the credit is valid. Credits are applied to invoices before the card is charged, but holding one does not let an account create resources without a card. It is not a balance that pays any invoice: it pays for the usage whose metered period overlaps its validity window, whenever the invoice for that usage is issued.

For example, a credit valid from 15 September to 15 October pays for the second half of September on September's invoice and the first half of October on October's invoice, and nothing before or after.

• When an invoice is issued, it spends your credits, the soonest-expiring first, on the earliest covered usage not yet paid, up to what each credit has left.
• A credit past its expiry is expired and pays for nothing more. Usage outside every credit's window is due.
• GET /v1/account/credits shows each credit's amount, what is left (remaining_cents), its expiry and status, and the account's total balance_cents. The usage summary carries credit_balance_cents and credit_next_expiry.

Coupons#

Redeeming a coupon grants a credit: the coupon's amount, valid from the redemption for the coupon's number of days. WELCOME500 grants €500 valid for 60 days. Redeem a code at sign-up (a sign-up link with ?coupon=WELCOME500), in Settings → Billing → Credits, or with POST /v1/account/coupons (billing.manage). Codes are not case sensitive, and each account redeems a coupon once. A refused redemption answers 422 with a reason: unknown, inactive, not_yet_valid, expired, exhausted or already_redeemed.

Invoices#

One invoice is issued per closed calendar month that had usage, once the meter has covered the whole month.

• total_cents is the sum of the capped usage lines.
• Each credit that paid part of it is a kind: "credit" line with a negative amount and the credit's label, for example Welcome credit WELCOME500; credit_applied_cents is their sum.
• amount_due_cents = total_cents − credit_applied_cents is what is charged.

An invoice credits pay in full is paid at once. Otherwise the amount due is charged to your default payment method through Stripe; the invoice carries payment_status (open, paid or overdue) and a hosted_invoice_url to view or pay it. Card details are entered only on Stripe's hosted pages and never reach Ankra Cloud. Manage payment methods in Settings → Billing; the first one you add becomes the default.

Before you create resources#

Servers, storages, databases, load balancers, object storage, floating IPs, edges, Kubernetes clusters and node pools and dev clusters are billed, so creating one needs a default payment method. Credits, including a redeemed coupon, still pay for usage first, but they do not stand in for the card: without one the create answers 402 with reason: payment_method_required, whatever credit the account holds. Add a card in Settings → Billing (the console opens Stripe's page; POST /v1/account/billing/setup-session with the API). Card details are entered only on Stripe's pages. The console says so on every page while the account has no card, and turns its create buttons off until one is saved.

An account linked to an Ankra Platform organisation whose owner has not yet approved paid usage creates resources only while a credit has money left; after that the create answers 402 with reason: owner_approval_required until the owner approves paid usage in Ankra Platform.

Servers that nothing pays for are not left running for free. When an account billed by card has no payment method on file and no credit left and still runs servers it is charged for, the console's notifications and an email to its owners and admins say so and name a date seven days later; a reminder follows about a day before. GET /v1/account/billing shows it as standing.unpaid_usage_since and standing.servers_stop_at. If no payment method was added by then, those servers are powered off. Powering off keeps disks, addresses and data, and you start the servers again yourself once a payment method is saved. Contact support if you cannot add one. The servers Ankra created for a dev cluster or for a managed Kubernetes cluster's node pools are not powered off this way.

When an invoice stays overdue for more than 7 days, the account is suspended for payment: the same creates answer 402 with reason: account_suspended. Nothing you already run is stopped or deleted, and paying the invoice lifts the suspension at once. Ankra staff can also suspend an account; contact support to lift that. GET /v1/account/billing shows your standing: can_create_resources and the reason a create would be refused with.

The free trial dev cluster#

An account linked to an Ankra Platform organisation can try a dev cluster before it adds a card. Without a card it may start one free trial dev cluster:

• on a plan with at most 1 core and 2 GiB of memory (for example starter-1c-2g), without the public IPv4 add-on;
• free: its server is never metered, so nothing it does reaches an invoice;
• deleted with its server 24 hours after it was created, unless the account saves a card first. Then it is kept as an ordinary dev cluster and billed as its server from the next full hour.

One trial runs at a time, and an account may start three in 30 days. GET /v1/account/billing carries dev_cluster_trial: whether one may be started now (is_available), and when not, why (reason is not_linked_to_platform, trial_running, trials_used or dev_clusters_not_offered, with a sentence in detail). A trial dev cluster carries is_trial: true and its trial_expires_at; a converted one carries trial_converted_at. In the console, Dev clusters offers Start a free 24-hour trial dev cluster while the account has no card, limits the plans to the trial's, and badges each trial with the time it has left.

Reading usage, invoices, credits and payment methods needs the billing.read permission; adding payment methods and redeeming coupons needs billing.manage. Owners and admins have both.

Quotas#

Every account has limits: a new account starts with 3 servers, 8 cores, 200 GiB of storage, 1 floating IP, 5 routers and 10 private networks. GET /v1/quotas shows limits and usage; allocations past a limit answer 422. Ask support to raise them.