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Compute bills a monthly plan fee plus usage. The fee includes usage credit worth the same amount, so the fee already covers your first slice of usage. You pay extra only for usage past the credit.

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Plans

You need a Compute plan to create projects and deploy. All plans use the same usage rates. A higher plan costs more, includes more credit, and raises the limits on your instances. See Limits for the full list and unkey.com/pricing for current prices.
Change Compute plan dialog with Starter, Pro, and BusinessChange Compute plan dialog with Starter, Pro, and Business

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How the bill works

Each month you pay the plan fee up front. Unkey grants the same dollar amount as usage credit for that month. Usage is metered as your workloads run, and at the end of the month the credit is subtracted. Whatever remains is the overage. Some examples on the Pro plan: Stay within the credit and the fee is all you pay. Credit that you don’t use expires with the month. It doesn’t roll over. Using 10inJunedoesn′tgiveyou10 in June doesn't give you 40 in July.

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Usage rates

Usage is measured per workspace and priced at these rates. Settings > Usage shows each meter’s quantity and cost for the current month. A running instance consumes CPU, memory, and disk whether or not it receives traffic. Only stopped or removed deployments stop those meters.

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Billing period and invoice timing

The Compute billing period is the calendar month, in UTC. Every Compute subscription renews on the first of the month. The invoice that Stripe issues on the first of a month contains two things:
  • The plan fee for the month that starts, billed in advance
  • Any overage from the month that just ended, billed in arrears
  • Proration lines if you changed plans during the month
For example, the invoice on July 1 charges the July plan fee plus any June usage above the June credit. On the invoice, the credit appears as a discount line named after the plan, such as “Pro plan monthly included usage”. When you subscribe partway through a month, the first fee is prorated to the days left in the month, and the credit for that month is prorated by the same amount.

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Change plan

Upgrades apply at once and buy more credit for the rest of the month. Downgrades keep the current month as you paid for it.
  1. Navigate to Settings > Billing.
  2. On the Compute row, click Choose a plan or Change.
  3. Select a plan and confirm.

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Cancel Compute

Cancelling Compute stops every deployment in the workspace right away and removes the plan.
  1. Navigate to Settings > Billing.
  2. On the Compute row, click Change, then Cancel Compute plan and confirm.
The fee you paid for the current month is not refunded. Usage up to the moment you cancelled still appears on the final invoice. Compute limits drop back to Free plan defaults. If you also have an API plan, it is not affected. If you want to keep your deployments running but pay less, downgrade instead of cancelling. A downgrade costs nothing this month and the lower fee starts on the first of next month.

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Keep usage in check

Most unexpected Compute charges come from workloads that run without anyone noticing.
  • Production instances bill around the clock. A deployment that receives no traffic still holds CPU, memory, and disk. Remove deployments you don’t need.
  • Preview deployments bill while active. They run real instances and stop only after an hour with no requests. See Deployments per environment.
  • Large responses add egress. Serving big payloads or files from a workload counts against the egress meter.
To put a hard ceiling on spend, set a spend budget.
Last modified on September 3, 2026