Appearance
Billing model
MicroApps is prepaid with hourly billing. You put credit on the account, usage accrues by the hour, and nothing renews or recharges on its own. No contracts, no monthly minimums, no surprise card charge.
We do not do free tiers. Someone always pays for a free tier, usually the paying customers next to it. Instead everything is cheap and you only pay for what runs. For actual numbers, see the pricing page.
How it works
- You add credit through Stripe Checkout ($3 minimum, $10,000 maximum, whole US dollars - no fixed presets, pick any amount).
- Each running resource accrues an hourly rate. The running total shows up as Usage this month on the Billing page.
- On the 2nd of each month we issue an invoice for the month just ended and settle it from your credit. You can download every invoice as a PDF.
Your balance moves when an invoice settles, not hour by hour - so don't worry when "Available credit" holds still while the usage meter climbs.
There is no auto-recharge. Credit only goes up when you top it up.
What is billed
Usage is billed hourly, against two things per pod:
- Compute - the pod's vCPU and RAM
- Storage - the pod's disk
Both charges run from the moment the pod is created to the moment it is deleted. Stopping a pod does not pause either of them: the disk is still held and the capacity is still reserved for you. Delete the pod to stop its charges.
Once paid backups start, backups are billed too. Each backup taken from then on is charged by the hour, from the moment it finishes until you delete it, for its size in GB (1 GB = 1024³ bytes), per GB a month (see the pricing page). Each one is its own invoice line, such as backup - my-app (0.68 GB). A backup outlives its pod, so deleting the pod does not stop the backup's charge; delete the backup for that. The start date is announced by email at least 30 days ahead and shown on the pricing page. Until then backups are free, and the ones taken before it stay free until 60 days after it, when they are deleted unless you keep them.
The resource specs (vCPU, RAM, disk size) are shown when you pick a size; the rates live on the pricing page.
What is free
- Custom domains and SSL certificates
- Snapshots, and backups until paid backups start
- Networks and firewalls
- Support tickets, the API, and MCP automation
"Free" means no hourly charge. You still need $3 on the account to create one: the floor is a check on your balance before any create, not a charge against it.
What costs extra
- Email hosting - available on request, ask us
- Heavy bandwidth - normal traffic is included, but if you are pushing terabytes, talk to us first
Alerts, not auto-billing
You can set a low-credit threshold and a high-usage (monthly spend) threshold, and point an alert webhook at Slack, Discord, or anything else that accepts JSON. The same webhook also receives monitoring alerts (domain uptime, resource and mailbox usage). These only notify you. Crossing a threshold sends a heads-up; it never charges your card or tops up automatically. Nothing on MicroApps bills you without you clicking pay. Set them up in the billing & credit guide.
When credit runs out
Set a low-credit alert so you see it coming - that is what the alerts are for. When your balance does run dry:
- Anything you try to create (a pod, a snapshot, a backup, a clone, a restore, a network, a firewall, a domain, a mailbox) is blocked with
Insufficient credit. You need at least $3 on your account to proceed.until you are back above $3. Everything already running keeps running. - The monthly invoice waits as pending until your balance can cover it in full. There are no part payments: an invoice your balance cannot cover is skipped and stays pending, and the oldest invoice your balance does cover settles first. Top-ups of any size are accepted while an invoice is pending.
An invoice that stays unpaid starts a clearly-signposted ladder, with an email at every step:
- Warning. We email you that payment could not be taken, with the exact date your pods will stop.
- Pods stopped - 2 business days after the warning, if still unpaid. Stopped pods keep their data and configuration.
- Backed up, then deleted - 3 more business days later, if still unpaid. Each pod is backed up first, and the pod is only deleted once that backup has completed. The backups are kept, so your data survives. Once paid backups start, each of these final backups is free, and is deleted 60 days after it was taken unless you keep it. The console labels them Final.
Deadlines are counted in business days and land on a weekday, so the date in the email is never a day nobody is at a keyboard.
Paying at any point ends the ladder automatically within minutes: pods we stopped are started again, and if pods were already deleted you can restore each one from its backup. Once paid backups start, restore or keep a final backup within those 60 days.