What it costs to run what you built
Your plan buys two things: AI credits for building, and a monthly hosting budget for the apps you publish. Here's exactly what draws that budget down.
The short version
Paid plans include a hosting budget — $10 a month on Pro, $20 a month on Business. When you publish an app, it starts using real cloud resources: a Postgres database, edge compute, file storage. We meter that usage hourly, charge it at what the providers charge us plus our margin, and draw it from your budget. Most small apps never come close to the ceiling. If you do exhaust it, the app is paused until you add credit or the next cycle starts — you are never billed a surprise overage.
The line-by-line breakdown
These rates are charged in US dollars against your included Cloud budget. Your workspace shows both the measured quantity and the amount used for every resource.
Database
Postgres compute while awake, stored data and data transfer.
- Compute
- $0.265 / CU-hour
- About $0.066 for an hour at the 0.25 CU minimum; sleeping databases use no compute.
- Storage
- $0.875 / GB-month
- Measured over time rather than from a single high-water mark.
- Data transfer
- $0.25 / GB
- Data transferred out of the managed database.
App runtime
Requests and server-side work performed by each published app.
- Requests
- $0.75 / 1M
- Every request served by a published app at the edge.
- CPU time
- $0.05 / 1M CPU-ms
- Only the processing time used by server-side code.
- Scheduled runs
- $0.05 / 1,000
- Each scheduled trigger that runs automatically.
Storage & email
Published versions, app uploads and managed sign-in email.
- File storage
- $0.0375 / GB-month
- Published versions and files uploaded by the people using your app.
- Managed email
- $0.25 / 1,000
- Sign-in emails sent through BerryBell's managed email service.
What a published app consumes
Your Postgres database
Compute while the database is awake, the data you store, and data transferred out. Databases sleep after a couple of minutes with no queries and cost nothing while asleep — they wake on the next connection.
Requests to your app
Every request your published app serves at the edge. Static assets and pages are cheap; the count is what matters, not the page weight.
CPU time
The processing time your server-side code actually spends on a request. An app that reads a row and renders a page uses a sliver of it.
Stored files
Published versions of your project, and the files your app's own users upload. Measured as an average over the month, not a high-water mark.
What isn't metered
- ✓ The workspace you build in. Editing, previewing and iterating on a project draws AI credits, never the hosting budget.
- ✓ Storage operations — reads and writes against your file storage are not billed as a separate line.
- ✓ Sleeping databases. An idle project bills nothing for compute, however long it sits there.
What that adds up to
Two made-up apps, to show the shape of a bill. These are illustrations, not quotes — your own usage depends on how much your database is awake and how much traffic you get.
A small internal tool
A handful of teammates, used in bursts. The database is awake around an hour a day, holds well under a gigabyte, and the app serves a few tens of thousands of requests a month.
- Database compute (awake time)
- a couple of dollars
- Database storage and transfer
- under a dollar
- Requests and CPU time
- cents
- Stored files
- cents
Comfortably inside the $10 monthly budget on Pro.
A customer-facing app in steady use
Traffic through the working day, so the database rarely gets to sleep — awake most of an eight-hour stretch — with a couple of gigabytes stored and a few hundred thousand requests a month.
- Database compute (awake time)
- the large majority of the bill
- Database storage and transfer
- a couple of dollars
- Requests and CPU time
- under a dollar
- Stored files
- cents
Runs past a $10 budget, and lands inside the $20 budget on Business. A top-up covers the gap on Pro.
Keeping the bill small
- Database compute is usually the largest line. Anything that keeps a connection open around the clock — a health check that queries, a poller — keeps the database awake and is the most expensive habit you can have.
- Cache what you can at the edge. A request served without touching Postgres costs a fraction of one that does.
- Prune old published versions you no longer need; they count as stored files.
If you run out
Paid plans get a small overdraft before anything happens, so an unusual afternoon doesn't pause production. Past that, published apps are paused: the edge serves a static paused page and the database stops accepting connections. Your project, its data and its history are untouched.
Adding credit resumes everything automatically — you don't have to redeploy — and so does the start of your next billing cycle.
Hosting, in detail
01 What is the hosting budget, exactly? + –
A dollar amount included with your plan each month — $10 on Pro, $20 on Business — that pays for the cloud resources your published apps actually consume. It is not a request quota or a bandwidth cap; it is a budget, and what you don't spend in a cycle doesn't roll over.
02 How is usage measured? + –
Hourly. We read metered usage from the underlying providers in hourly windows and convert it to a dollar figure at our cost plus our margin. Because provider figures need time to settle, usage typically appears in your workspace one to three hours after it happens.
03 What happens when the hosting budget runs out? + –
Published apps are paused. On a paid plan there is a small overdraft first, so a brief spike doesn't take production down; on the free tier the pause happens as soon as a window can't be paid for. A paused app serves a static "paused" page and its database stops accepting connections — nothing is deleted. Adding credit or the start of a new cycle resumes it automatically.
04 Do AI credits pay for hosting? + –
Your balance is one wallet, so a top-up you buy can cover either rail. What your plan includes is split: the AI allotment is for building, the hosting budget is for running.
05 Is there a discount for buying more? + –
Top-up packs credit your balance at face value — $10 buys $10 of balance. There are no bonus credits and no volume kicker; larger plans buy more, not cheaper.
06 Can I see what my app is spending? + –
Yes. Your workspace shows current-cycle hosting usage broken down per resource, with a timestamp for how fresh the numbers are. We also email you when your balance is running low, so a rising bill reaches you before a pause does.
Publish it and see
Start free, deploy a real app, and watch what it actually costs to run.