How Billing Works on Slicie

What do you mean by "pay for what you use?"

The idea is simple; we want the amount you pay each day to be proportional to the amount you actually used.

We don't offer web hosting plans, and we bill each individual resource separately. This means that your costs for things like CPU, Memory, and Storage are all separate.

We show your usage in real-time throughout the day for each one of your servers. Read our docs that explain how usage is labeled in our interface.

How is usage billed?

Your server starts out with no usage or invoiced resources.

Due to automatic scaling, you have access to more than what you use. When your server starts with the default auto-scaling settings, you have access to 3 vCPUs, but you aren't paying anything.

After you use a particular resource (vCPUs, Memory, Storage) for one hour, you will be invoiced. Once something is invoiced, it's yours to use for the rest of the day at no additional cost.

Since auto-scaling will give you more than you're paying for, we give you one hour of free access to resources you aren't paying for. After you use a resource for one hour, it is added to your daily invoice. Imagine that you are paying for 2 vCPUs, and auto-scaling has given your server access to 6 vCPUs. Any CPU usage from 0% to 200% (fully using 2 vCPUs) is free. If your server uses 300% (3 vCPUs) for one hour, you will be invoiced 3 vCPUs. If, instead, your server used 250% (2.5 vCPUs), it would take two hours to be invoiced for that third vCPU. To be clear, if your server never uses more than 2 vCPUs (200%) in a day, it will never be invoiced for more than 2 vCPUs, even if you use 200% for 24 hours.

How does daily billing work?

Once you're invoiced for a resource, you can use it as much as you want for the rest of the day for no additional cost. If you've paid for 4 GiB of RAM, you're free to continue using 4 GiB of RAM all day.

At the end of the day, each of your resources are invoiced for as little as half of their currently invoiced amounts. This means that if you paid for 20 GiB of memory one day, the next day you can pay for as little as 10 GiB (then 5 GiB the next day, then 2 GiB, then 1 GiB). While this might seem unequitable in a situation where you have a gigantic spike of demand for one single day, the intention is to prevent denying servers resources at the start of the day that they will inevitably wind up using later in the day during their peak usage.

At the end of each day, we aggregate the invoiced resources used across all of your servers for the purposes of generating future invoices.

How are the monthly and daily rates calculated?

The daily rate is the same as the month rate divided by 31. This means that on a month with less than 31 days, you'll pay a little less for hosting.

When do I pay?

By default we invoice accounts at the end of each month; however, we have limits ($25, $75, $200, $500, $1,500, and $5,000) that will cause an invoice to be generated when they are reached for the first time. If your account hits a limit and is invoiced prematurely before the end of the month, we won't ask you to pay that amount early in the future. This is designed to ensure that customers are aware of their usage so that they aren't blind-sided by unexpected costs.

How precisely do you calculate and display costs?

We show dollar amounts with two decimal points of precision for easy reading. We round up or down to the nearest penny for display, but not for aggregating the total costs. For instance, you may find a total or subtotal is not penny-precise when adding up each individual component we display, but that is due to the lack of precision in display but not in its calculation.

We generally try to calculate the time using a resource to the maximum possible precision. For storage, where calculations are done at a very low level, we have sub-millisecond precision. As another example, we bill public IPv4 addresses based on the cummulative amount of seconds used within a month (keeping in mind you can't be billed for more than 2,419,200 seconds, because that's the 28-day cap).

Where can I see my usage and costs?

We show each server's usage in real-time on the "server overview" page.

We also show your aggregated usage across all server during the day on the page titled "Today's Invoiced Usage" in our customer portal.

You can see every individual day's usage on the page titeld "Daily Server Usage". This will show you every day you've been invoiced for going back to the start of your account.

We email weekly usage reports by default. You can also view this in our customer portal on the page titled "View Your Usage Report."

How can I control my costs?

Ultimately you pay for what you use; this means that the way to control your costs is by controlling your usage.

We provide scaling limits which limit your costs by restricting your usage. We also have settings to control how aggressively your CPU and Memory.