Usage-based billing on klickops, explained
Cloud pricing tends to fail in one of two directions. Flat plans make you pay for capacity you do not use, and pure pay-as-you-go hands your card to an unbounded meter. klickops uses a third model: a plan price that converts into a usage credit worth more than you paid, hourly metering of what actually runs, and a prepaid wallet for anything beyond the credit. This guide explains each piece with the real numbers.
The core idea: pay CHF 9, spend CHF 10
Every klickops plan is a monthly price that turns into usage credit worth more than the price. Hobby costs CHF 9 and grants CHF 10 of credit. Starter is CHF 29 for CHF 35, Pro is CHF 79 for CHF 100, and Scale is CHF 199 for CHF 270. Custom plans start at CHF 200 in CHF 50 steps, and every franc becomes CHF 1.36 of credit. The bonus is a built-in volume discount that grows with the tier: on Scale you effectively get 36 percent more to spend than you pay.
The free plan is the same mechanism at miniature scale: CHF 0 per month with CHF 1 of monthly credit, enough for one small stack (one app and one database inside a small envelope). No card is required, and the credit renews every month.
Your workloads then draw from that credit by the hour. Fill most of it and the bonus is your discount. Use less and the plan price is simply your monthly cost, the same way any subscription floor works.
Hourly metering of what actually runs
klickops meters resources hourly at published list rates, and it meters actual consumption, not a reserved instance shape. CPU and memory are auto-sized, so you never guess at requests or pick an instance type; the platform observes what your app needs and bills for that. The current rates:
- Processing: CHF 0.0493 per vCPU-hour, about CHF 36 for a full vCPU running an entire month.
- Memory: CHF 0.0247 per GB-hour, about CHF 18 per GB-month.
- Block storage (replicated SSD): CHF 0.000274 per GB-hour, about CHF 0.20 per GB-month.
- Shared storage (NFS): CHF 0.000342 per GB-hour, about CHF 0.25 per GB-month.
- Object storage (S3-compatible): CHF 0.0000685 per GB-hour, about CHF 0.05 per GB-month.
- Backup storage: listed at the object-storage rate but not billed yet.
Why hourly metering changes behavior
Monthly averaging is what makes scale to zero worth something. An app that runs eight hours a day costs a third of one that runs around the clock. A preview environment that lives for two days costs two days. A staging stack you stop on Friday evening stops costing you on Friday evening. On dyno-style or instance-style pricing, all of those bill as full months.
It also removes the sizing ritual. Because compute is auto-sized and metered, oversizing does not silently burn money for months; you pay for the footprint your app actually has, and the billing page shows live spend, a burn-down against your credit and a month-end forecast, so drift is visible while you can still act on it.
The prepaid wallet: overage without the horror story
What happens when usage exceeds the plan credit? The difference is pay-as-you-go at the same list rates, funded from a prepaid wallet that you top up deliberately. There is no open-ended card on file that the meter can run against, which is the failure mode behind every viral surprise-bill story in usage-priced clouds.
The wallet only ever spends money you have already decided to commit. If credit and wallet are both exhausted, klickops warns you and, after a grace window, pauses workloads rather than piling up an invoice. On the free plan the same logic applies with one extra rule: free organizations cannot top up a wallet at all, so exceeding the free credit means choosing a paid plan, never an accidental charge.
Plan limits protect you; they are not what you pay for
Each tier also carries limits: how many projects, apps, custom domains and databases you can create, and how much capacity a single project can request. Hobby allows 2 projects, 10 apps, 3 custom domains and a 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 50 GB envelope per project; Pro allows 15 projects, 75 apps, 30 domains and 16 vCPU / 32 GB / 500 GB; Scale raises those to 40 projects, 200 apps, 100 domains and 32 vCPU / 64 GB / 2 TB.
It is worth being precise about what these are. They are protective caps, sized so that normal use never touches them, and they exist to stop abuse and runaway mistakes, not to meter you. Billing stays usage-only: hitting a limit never costs money, and headroom you do not use never appears on an invoice. If a limit does get in your way, that is the signal you have outgrown the tier, and moving up also grows your credit bonus.
A worked example with real numbers
Take a production app with a database: averaging 0.8 vCPU, 3 GB of memory, 40 GB of block storage for the database volume and 40 GB of object storage for uploads. At list rates that is 0.8 x CHF 36 = CHF 28.80 of processing, 3 x CHF 18 = CHF 54.00 of memory, 40 x CHF 0.20 = CHF 8.00 of block storage and 40 x CHF 0.05 = CHF 2.00 of object storage, about CHF 92.80 of usage in a full month.
On the Pro plan, that CHF 92.80 fits inside the CHF 100 credit, so the bill is exactly the plan price: CHF 79. You received CHF 92.80 of infrastructure for CHF 79, about 15 percent below list, with CHF 7.20 of credit left as headroom for a traffic spike.
At the small end the same shape holds: a side project averaging 0.1 vCPU, 0.3 GB of memory and 4 GB of disk is about CHF 9.80 of usage, which the Hobby plan's CHF 10 credit covers for a CHF 9 bill.
How to pick a plan
The honest strategy is to pick the plan whose credit you will mostly fill, because that is where the bonus behaves like a real discount. And because overage is billed at plain list rates with no penalty, a smaller plan plus occasional overage can be cheaper than jumping a tier; the pricing calculator on the pricing page does this comparison for you and recommends whichever combination costs least, even when that is the smaller plan.
If you are starting from zero: begin on Free, deploy the small stack, and let the live billing page tell you what your app actually consumes. Real metered numbers after a week beat any capacity guess you could make up front, and moving between plans is a click, not a migration.
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