Plans

A plan sets execution funding and caps storage, memory held at once and outbound traffic. Each plan's price and amounts are on Pricing.

crab billing
crab plans

crab billing prints the account's plan and period, its credit, its refill and its card. crab plans prints the plans sold and what each includes, crab rates what use past them costs, and crab usage how much of the plan is used.

crab plans requires a Cloud context: run crab login first. The local host has no plans and needs no account.

Plan lineup

Each account has its own subscription, resource budgets and Credit. Organization members share that account's resources; adding members does not increase its allowances. Personal subscriptions do not fund organizations. Credit and Trial credit cannot be transferred between accounts.

Personal Hobby hosts with eligible Trial credit. Organization Hobby supports membership; hosting requires Scale or a comped entitlement. See Organizations.

Capacity limits

Capacity is shared by the account's services. Credit cannot raise these limits. See Storage and Memory for what counts.

Included execution

Each resource has its own budget. Usage beyond it draws eligible Credit at the execution rates; unused budgets do not become Credit. Paid proxy I/O retains its separate metering. Hobby has no monthly execution budget. The deployment's configured amounts appear on Pricing.

Credit returns

Pro and Scale each return $10 in ordinary Credit per paid period. Credit can buy priced calls and cover paid-plan execution beyond included budgets. Returns issue only after payment succeeds; retries do not issue them again. New returns expire at the end of the subscription billing period they cover, with no rollover. Purchased Credit and auto-refills last 12 months. Subscription refunds are reviewed manually by email. See Credit.

Hobby

Hobby has no monthly subscription. Personal and organization accounts hold it until they receive a paid or comped entitlement. The verification and trial terms below currently apply to personal accounts. Unverified, Hobby calls other services' tools but deploys nothing (E0001). Verification issues one $1 trial grant valid for 30 days. After credit exhaustion or expiry, data is kept for 30 days before deletion. Deployments can configure these terms; Pricing and verification show the current offer.

• Verifying takes a GitHub account connected to yours, at least a year old, whose own public repositories hold at least 10 stars, forks left out. One GitHub account verifies one CrabTalk account, once.
• Where: crab billing verify, which verifies at once when the check passes and prints a link when it does not; the account's Usage page; or a deploy's approval page. Signed in with Google, connect GitHub on any of those pages. A check that fails names why: E0003 to E0006.
• Idle services: a service with no calls or runs for 7 days since it was deployed or started is stopped, and kept with its data. Starting it brings it back.
• Storage and memory: Hobby keeps its configured limits, currently 128 MiB for storage and 128 MiB for concurrent memory. Storage is included without drawing credit. Set [database] size in crab.toml, since the default database reservation is 1 GiB.
• Calling others' services costs Hobby nothing: the service's owner pays for those calls, against their own plan, except a priced tool's price.
• Trial funding: execution reserves trial credit before running, from the first billable unit. Trial funds never reset each month. Purchased credit pays priced tools but does not extend Hobby hosting.
• When trial credit ends: calls, deploys and starts are refused; services pause. Data remains until the recovery deadline shown in Billing and Usage, then services and their data are deleted. Upgrade before that deadline or export the data. A paid entitlement protects the services from trial cleanup.
• One grant: verification retries, plan changes and cancellation never replenish it. Canceling returns to Hobby with any original trial funds still valid, otherwise the 30-day recovery period starts. This also applies to accounts that never received trial credit.
• Without verifying, Go deploys at $5 a month.

Included amounts

Paid plans include runs, CPU time past each run's first 0.1 ms, rows read, rows written and memory held each month. A trial-funded Hobby account has no recurring execution allowance; its outbound cap and usage reporting still use billing periods. The amounts are on Pricing.

• What is counted: runs of your services, the CPU time each run spends past its first 0.1 ms, the rows they read and write, and each call's memory budget during execution in GB-hours, including waits on fetches or other services and excluding code loading. The number of services is not limited.
• When it resets: at the start of each billing period. Unused amounts do not carry over.
• Per call: each call is also bounded by its tool's budget, the CPU time, rows and memory one call may use.
• Runs: a run is one call from outside, a cron or wake firing, or a Stripe event. The calls it makes to your other services are part of it, and their CPU time counts toward its 0.1 ms.
• Warnings: at 80% and at 100% of each included amount, and when credit runs out, on the account's Usage page and by email to the account's owners.
• Data sent: each plan also caps the bytes its services send off CrabTalk in a period, answers to outside callers and requests to other sites together. Past it, the account's services take no calls until the period ends, whatever its credit.

Storage

• What is counted: database reservations, retained service and template images, and pending image or seed uploads. New deployments use the image's database default, 1 GiB when unset, and at most 10 GiB. Images count once per service and digest. Templates retain three release images; deployed services retain their current image and two previous successful images. Shared references to the same service image count once.
• The limit: all of these share your account's storage allowance, on Pricing. Uploads, template publication and deploys that need more capacity are refused. Credit does not raise it.
• Temporary uploads: capacity is reserved before upload. Abandoned uploads expire after an hour; cleanup releases their reservation after deleting the object. A used seed is scheduled for deletion after installation. A still-valid upload URL delays deletion.
• Usage: the account's Usage page breaks allocated storage into database reservations and objects. Each service's Monitoring page shows its database allocation against its capacity; WAL, logs and runtime caches do not consume that database capacity.
• A full database: a write past the service's own size fails in that service alone.

Memory

Each plan also limits the memory your services hold at once; the limits are on Pricing, and what they hold now is on the account's Usage page.

• What is counted: retained service code and the memory held by running calls, including time waiting on a fetch or another service. Idle code is released automatically and reloads on the next call; the service remains deployed. The RAM figure is an accounting estimate, not measured process memory.
• At the limit: idle cached code is reclaimed first. If active calls still occupy the allowance, further calls are refused, crons and wakes fire again later, and a call that grows past it fails. Credit does not raise it.
• Deploying: an image larger than the allowance is refused, and the service keeps what it ran before.

Past an included amount

On a paid plan, use past the included amounts is paid from credit. After its credit grace period, an account out of credit is refused:

• Calls to your services are refused.
• Crons and wakes wait, and run once the account is back within its plan.
• Your services and their data are kept.

A paid account resumes when it buys credit, upgrades or reaches its next billing period. A reporting-period reset never replenishes Hobby trial funds. Nothing past the included amounts is ever invoiced.

Changing plans

Change plans on the account's Usage page. An agent never pays: crab billing plan <slug> prints a link to a page where a person signed in puts the account on the plan, with --for saying what it is for. crab request <code> --wait returns once they have paid, and crab request <code> --expire ends the link early.

• Upgrading starts the new plan after successful payment, charges the prorated price difference and prorates additional execution budgets and Credit. Capacity limits change immediately; the renewal date and existing period usage stay unchanged.
• Downgrading starts the new plan at the next billing period, and you keep your plan until then. The Usage page shows the date; Keep your plan to undo it.
• Cancelling takes effect at the paid term’s end. Personal accounts return to Hobby. Organizations must qualify for Hobby or enter their 30-day recovery window; see Organizations.
• crab billing portal opens the payment portal in the browser: --card to change the card, --cancel to cancel the plan at the period's end. crab billing invoices lists the account's invoices, newest first.

For example, upgrading from Pro to Scale halfway through a period adds 5 million runs and no additional Credit to that period's original allowances. Memory rises to 4 GiB immediately. The next paid period receives Scale's full budgets and $10 Credit.