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.
- At the start of the next month we issue an invoice summarising that usage 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
The resource specs (vCPU, RAM, disk size) are shown when you pick a size; the rates live on the pricing page. Delete a pod to stop its charges.
What is free
- Custom domains and SSL certificates
- Snapshots and backups
- Networks and firewalls
- Support tickets, the API, and MCP automation
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 new that is billable (creating, cloning, restoring) is blocked until you are back above $3.
- 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 - 5 business days after the warning, if still unpaid. Stopped pods keep their data and configuration.
- Backed up, then deleted - 5 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.
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.