# Billing

There is no billing system yet because there is nothing to bill. No card is collected, no plan is sold, and no invoice exists. This page describes what will happen once a node is live, and it is deliberately short.

## How it will work

- Per target, per month, at the published rate for its kind and size. The same number for everyone.
- No minimum and no commitment. A target you stop still bills until you delete it or pause it: pausing takes it off the meter without deleting it.
- Deleting a target is one thing that stops the meter. Pausing is the other.
- Egress is metered separately at $0.02/GB, published rather than estimated, because surprise egress is the most common complaint in this category.
- No invoices exist yet. When billing starts they are downloadable, and the [dashboard](/dashboard) shows what you are spending this month.

## The spend ceiling

Every account has a monthly ceiling, set by you. A create that would take you past it is refused, not queued, and the refusal names the number that stopped it.

```
kraftify ceiling
kraftify ceiling set 200
```

Two things separate this from a budget setting. The agent can read the ceiling through `kraftify_ceiling`, so it can tell you a request is too large before it tries. And nothing in the CLI or the tool surface can raise it, because a cap the agent can lift is not a cap.

Every provider in this category publishes a spend threshold. We are not aware of one that refuses.

## No free tier

You pay from the first byte. The honest reason is arithmetic: the free tiers in this category got stripped or withdrawn, and the ones that survived are small, expiring or hard capped, which is a worse product for the person using it than a number at the start. A free tier here is also an identity verification programme with extra steps, since every database someone creates has to be attributable to somebody.

Granted boxes are the deliberate exception, not a tier: a moderator gives a specific account a specific target free, and it shows who granted it. See [Credits](/docs/credits) and [Pausing](/docs/pausing).

## What we keep

The billing record is the only thing kept for years, because tax law says so: target, node, renewal date. That is the whole record. See [What we store](/docs/data).

> Nothing on this page is an offer. There is no price to lock in and no preorder to join.