ORC8R Cloud is the hosted version of ORC8R. This page explains the two plans, how you move from the free plan to a paid one, and where to manage payment and invoices. Billing is handled per organization, so each organization has its own plan and payment details.

The two plans

Demo

Every new organization starts on the Demo plan. Demo is free and lets you try ORC8R, but it is capped so it is not meant for real workloads:

• It allows only a small number of projects, pools, and nodes (by default, two of each per level).
• Demo pools are temporary. A demo pool is automatically shut down about 24 hours after it was last started, so nodes do not run indefinitely for free.
• You cannot raise these limits yourself while on Demo.

Base

The Base plan is the paid plan. You move onto it simply by adding a payment method (see below). On Base:

• The per-project, per-pool, and per-node caps are lifted.
• Pools are no longer automatically expired.
• Your usage is billed (see "How billing works").

Upgrading to a paid plan

When you hit a demo limit, ORC8R shows a note inviting you to Add payment method. You can also upgrade at any time from the Billing page:

1. Open your organization and click the Billing tab.
2. Click Add Payment Method.
3. You are taken to our payment provider, Stripe, to enter your card details securely.

Once your card is saved, your organization moves to the Base plan automatically. ORC8R never sees or stores your full card number — that is handled entirely by Stripe.

If you later remove your payment method, the organization returns to the Demo plan and its limits apply again.

How billing works

Billing is based on usage: you pay for the machines you run, charged by the hour, in US dollars. Because different providers cost different amounts, your rate depends on the provider a pool uses. There is no flat monthly subscription fee for the Base plan itself.

How a node's hourly rate is worked out depends on the pool. On our own capacity it comes from the share of a whole machine the node asks for — its vCPUs, its memory, and, on pools that offer it, its App data size. On a pool backed by a cloud provider the provider prices the node itself, from the region, machine type and image you chose, and your rate is that price plus our margin. Either way the rate is per hour, in US dollars, and it is broken down on the node's own page by what is being charged for: compute, storage, an operating-system licence, network.

App data is the storage your apps keep across node replacements; a pool that asks for none of it is not charged for any. Where App data is priced, the cost estimator on our home page offers it as a choice alongside the rest, so you can see the rate before you create anything. On Demo, the App data size a pool may ask for is capped; the cap is lifted with the rest on Base.

The estimator lists every pool we sell and shows what one node of it costs per hour and per month. The choices it offers are the ones that pool actually publishes — vCPU and memory on our own capacity, region and machine type on a cloud pool — and picking a shape it does not offer is not possible. If a pool cannot be priced at that moment, the estimator says so rather than showing a zero: a provider that is not answering is a price we do not have, not a node that is free.

Managing billing

The Billing tab of your organization has three sections:

• Payment — shows your current plan and, on a paid plan, your next billing date. From here you add or manage your payment method.
• Upcoming Invoice — a running preview of your current period's charges, broken down by pool, with the number of nodes, hours, and amount. A Recalculate Usage button refreshes the figures.
• Invoices — a list of your past invoices. Each one is marked paid or pending, and opens to a detailed breakdown by pool. Where available, an invoice links to a printable version hosted by Stripe.

An invoice's lines are grouped by pool, and within each pool by what is being charged for: the machines themselves, storage, an operating-system licence a provider passes on, and network. A pool that ran Windows nodes on attached volumes shows a compute line, an OS-licence line and a storage line rather than one lump sum, so you can see where a month went. If the platform loses a machine you were running, its time is credited back to you on the same invoice, as its own line.

Viewing billing requires the right permission in your organization; only organization owners can add or change the payment method, which is what moves the organization between plans (see Organizations).

If a payment fails

If a charge does not go through, we do not shut your account down straight away. Instead:

• Your organization's owners get a notification in the app and an email titled "Invoice payment failed."
• Your account stays active, and the charge is retried automatically.
• You are asked to update your payment method to keep things running.

To fix it, open the Billing tab and update your card.

Related pages

• Organizations — plans, limits, and roles are set per organization.
• Support — contact us if you have a billing question.