Billing & pricing

PandaStack bills per second of actual runtime. Anything suspended, hibernated, or scaled to zero bills no compute at all. The live rate card is always available at GET /v1/pricing — the tables below mirror it.

Workload-class rates

One rate card. Sandboxes, apps and managed databases all bill the same two meters at the same prices — there is no per-class pricing:

• CPU vs. memory: memory bills by resident working-set GiB-hours — the RAM your workload actually keeps warm — capped at your committed size, so it can only come out cheaper than paying for the full baked size. CPU is billed by active CPU-seconds actually used, capped at the committed vCPU ceiling. A workload pays at most for what it provisioned, and usually much less: an 8-vCPU VM that sits idle bills almost no CPU. This applies to sandboxes, apps and databases alike.
• Apps: builds run inside your app's VM at the same rates. There are no separate build minutes.
• Databases: point-in-time recovery, backups, and failover are included, and database VMs run in a class that is never overcommitted — but they are priced like everything else, on the CPU they burn and the memory they hold resident. A database that auto-suspends bills storage only.
• Idle is free: hibernated sandboxes, sleeping apps, and auto-suspended databases bill no compute — only storage.

Storage & egress

Egress is metered so we can see it, but it is not charged on any plan. We do expect fair use — if a workspace's traffic is wildly out of line with normal agent, app, and database workloads we will get in touch rather than bill you by surprise.

Plans & credits

Plan base fees convert 1:1 into monthly usage credit — you only pay overage beyond it:

Every plan gets the same 8 burstable vCPUs — plans differ on memory, concurrency, and features, not CPU.

Apps deploy on the Free tier. The free credit covers a side project that sleeps when idle (a sleeping app + a dev database fit comfortably). An app kept always-on exhausts the free credit in a few days, after which it is hibernated until the next month — upgrade to Pro to keep apps always-on.

What happens when the free credit runs out

Running out of free credit stops compute. It never destroys your work.

At 80% of the credit you get a heads-up email. At 100%:

• Running apps, databases, and sandboxes are paused — they stop running, and stop costing anything. Their state is preserved exactly as it was.
• New creates return 402 Payment Required until there is credit again.
• A paused app's URL answers 503 with a short "this app is paused" page rather than failing to connect, so visitors and crawlers see something sensible.

Nothing is deleted. There is no grace period and no countdown — your code, data, volumes, and settings are kept for as long as the workspace exists. The workspace stays paused until either:

• you add a payment method or upgrade — the pause lifts on the next reconcile (within about a minute) and your resources resume where they left off; or
• your monthly credit resets, which lifts the pause automatically.

Running workloads are never surprise-billed: exceeding the free credit pauses them rather than charging you.

Where to see your usage

The dashboard's Billing page shows the credit meter and month-to-date usage. Programmatically, GET /v1/pricing returns the current rates and tier catalog.