Pricing and billing

Every charge

Charge	When	How it is priced	Where you see it
Creation fee	Once, when you create an instance	The same for every size, set by the platform	The offering, the rent form, the quote of `ghost instance create`
Balance hold	Held while the instance exists, then released	Days of the base price, plus a home instance’s gateway base or a cloud instance’s address price	The offering, the instance’s Overview, Reserved on Billing
Base price	From when its creation succeeds until its deletion completes	Per month, the offering’s	Capacity, the offering, the instance’s Price
CPU time	Where the provider’s hypervisor measured it	Above the base price, up to the price at full CPU use	Usage › Charges
Traffic	As the platform meters it	Per TiB: the provider’s on a cloud host (twice it with a Shared IP), the gateway tier’s on a home host	Usage › Charges
Mesh traffic	What a home instance sends to your other instances directly, over the host mesh	Per TiB sent: WAN mesh across the internet, LAN mesh on one local network; received traffic is free	The Traffic kind on Billing, an instance’s Usage and Mesh tabs
Gateway base charge	Monthly, from when the gateway has its place for a home instance	The gateway tier’s, at the gateway it was placed on	The instance’s Price, the Gateway kind on Billing
Address price	Monthly, while a cloud instance is billed, where its provider charges for the address	The provider’s	The Address kind on Billing
Backup creation and restore	Once, when the backup is published or the restore is accepted	Per GiB, the platform’s	The instance’s Backups tab, the quote of `ghost backup create` and `restore`
Backup storage	In 15-minute intervals until deletion completes	Per GiB per 30-day month, the price the backup recorded	Billing

Amounts that the platform’s runtime configuration sets, such as the creation fee and the balance hold, are shown with each offering on the website and by ghost catalog offering. This page does not repeat their current values.

Charges and resource limits

Creating an instance

Creating a host or an instance carries a small creation charge. It keeps abuse from growing the platform’s database and infrastructure.

An instance’s creation charge is the same for every size.
A container instance is charged as a VM of its size: the same creation fee, hold and prices.
The host creation charge is non-refundable.
Each catalog offering lists what creating an instance from it costs besides its monthly prices: instance_creation_charge_microusd is the one-time creation fee, and balance_reservation_microusd is the part of your balance held while the instance exists.
Before it creates anything, ghost instance create prints the offering’s terms and costs on stderr: the creation fee, with --backup the backup’s restore charge, which is not refunded, the balance hold (for a home instance plus its gateway’s base charge), the monthly prices, and the traffic price.
When your available balance cannot pay for a creation and keep your protected balance, Gigahost does not accept it and answers insufficient_balance. The message names what the creation needs (the creation charge, the restore charge and the hold), what is available and how much of it is protected.

The balance hold

An instance also locks a separate, refundable balance hold for its lifetime. The locked amount is not spendable while the instance exists and is released according to the instance lifecycle and compensation rules.

The hold is a number of days of the instance’s base price that the platform sets (30 by default), and no less than a minimum the platform sets.
It is fixed when the instance is created: a later change of the setting does not change the hold of an instance that exists.
A home instance also locks its gateway tier’s monthly base charge.
A cloud instance also locks a month of its address price where its provider charges for the address.
Each hold comes back to your available balance when its instance is deleted.

The protected balance

Every account keeps a protected balance, $5 unless you choose otherwise: a new rental, upgrade, backup or restore is accepted only while what its charge leaves of your available balance, with a live trial credit, is that much at least. It is there for the instances you already run. Without it, a new rental could take your balance to almost nothing, and an instance that runs would be deleted within minutes when its next charges found nothing left; with $5 kept back, a new rental never ends one you have, and those you have keep the $5 to run on.

The instances you run are never stopped by it: their own charges take the balance down to zero as before. Stopping, starting and deleting instances, deleting backups and adding funds work below it too.
You can choose any amount from $1 to $10,000. $1 is the least, so the protection cannot be turned off; a larger amount suits an account whose instances cost more, as $5 lasts them less long. A change takes effect at once, lower or higher.
The website’s Account page shows it, below the GitHub section, as “Protected balance: $5.00 (default)” or “(your choice)”, with a Set protected balance ($) field to change it and Use the default to follow the platform’s default again. ghost account protection set 2.50 and ghost account protection default do the same, and ghost account balance shows it.
A request it refuses gets insufficient_balance with what it needs, what is available and how much of that is protected.
A trial credit counts toward what is left, so a trial keeps $5 of its credit back by default.
Enrolling a host leaves it too: the host-creation charge is paid from your available balance alone and must leave your protected balance.

Refunds of a failed creation

An instance’s creation charge is refunded if its creation fails, unless you caused the failure, together with every gateway base charge of a home instance.

The refund is posted automatically as one refund transaction when the creation fails, or at the latest when the failed instance is deleted.
A failure you caused is not refunded: a restore from a hosted backup that you did not authorize in time, or whose key could not be unwrapped, or an instance you deleted while its restore waited for your authorization.
A container instance whose image could not be used is not refunded either: a tag or repository its registry does not have, or gives only with credentials, an image that is not built for linux/amd64, or one that does not unpack or names no process to run (container_image_refused). One whose registry did not answer, or answered with a server error or “too many requests”, is refunded (container_registry_unavailable).
A creation from a backup also keeps its restore charge.
Refunded creations still count toward the daily creation limit.

While an instance exists

An instance pays its base price from when its creation succeeds until its deletion completes, whatever its power state.

The base price is its provider’s price for the size plus Gigahost’s own fixed price per instance, the same on every host whatever the size; that fixed price is $0 today, and a change of it reaches an existing instance after 90 days’ notice, as a provider’s price change does.
Host downtime: while its host is down, the downtime that SLA credits count bills no base price and no CPU time.
CPU use is added where the provider’s hypervisor measured it.
Billing can also end earlier, at a provider’s retirement deadline or when your balance runs out.

Traffic

An instance pays one traffic price: its provider’s on a cloud host and its gateway tier’s on a home host.

A cloud instance with a Shared IP pays twice its provider’s traffic rate, rounded up to a whole micro-USD per TiB. The Shared IP has no monthly price, so its share of the host’s address is paid with its traffic instead: an instance that sends little pays little for it. The provider earns its share of the whole rate, as of any traffic.
A cloud instance with a Dedicated IP, and every home instance, pays the rate as published.
The offering lists the traffic rate of each address, so you can compare the two before you choose; ghost catalog offerings --ip shared and the IP filter on Capacity show the Shared IP’s.
Traffic is metered by the platform, not by the provider’s hypervisor: by a router VM on a cloud host and by the hosted gateway of a home instance.
Metered traffic is billed as counted, including traffic to a stopped instance and traffic counted while its host is down.
A home instance’s gateway bills the traffic it sends into its tunnel toward the instance and the traffic it receives from the instance’s host. An inbound flood that the gateway drops, or traffic the tunnel discards, is not billed.

Traffic between your own instances

When you have instances on two hosts that can reach each other directly, at least one of them a home host, their traffic to each other takes the host mesh rather than the home instance’s gateway. That is often faster, and it has prices of its own, per TiB sent:

Path	Price	When
WAN mesh	$5.00/TiB	A home instance sends to your instance on another home host or a cloud host, across the internet
LAN mesh	$1.00/TiB	A home instance sends to an instance on another home host of the same local network

Only the sender pays, and each byte once. What an instance receives over the mesh is free; through a gateway, a home instance pays both directions.
Between two home hosts across the internet, the bytes billed are the higher of the two hosts’ counts, so neither host can lower the charge on its own. The receiving host’s count usually runs about one percent higher on TCP.
Between two home hosts on one local network, the bytes billed are the lower of the two hosts’ counts. The sending host’s provider earns the charge, so when the receiving host is another provider’s, the sending host’s count alone cannot raise it. When both hosts are the same provider’s, both counts are that provider’s; the bytes billed then stay within what your instance’s bandwidth limit lets it send, with a quarter of margin. Traffic only one of the two hosts has counted so far is billed once the other counts it too.
Toward a cloud host, the cloud host’s router counts what the home instance sent.
A cloud instance pays nothing new: what it sends a home instance is its internet traffic at its provider’s rate, as before.
WAN mesh charges are Gigahost’s; LAN mesh charges go to the sending host’s provider in full, with no platform fee. Credit you have at that provider pays a LAN mesh charge first.
These prices are not shown when you rent, since they depend on where your other instances run; the platform’s pricing read (GET /v1/catalog/platform-pricing) gives the prices in effect and any change to come.
A rise takes effect 90 days after its notice to every renter with a home instance, and a reduction at once.

Gateway charges of a home instance

The gateway tiers are shared_bandwidth, high_bandwidth and shared_ip (see Connecting and networking).

Their recurring and traffic prices are included in the offering information: the monthly base charge and the traffic price of the gateway the instance would be placed on, which can differ by gateway location.
A shared_ip home instance pays the Shared IP’s price per the price list, which the offering shows.
A home instance’s gateway base charge starts earlier than its base price, once the gateway has its place for the instance: with shared_bandwidth once the instance’s own address has been reserved, with high_bandwidth once the instance’s own gateway has been created. That can be minutes before the instance runs.
It is refunded with the creation charge when the creation fails for a reason other than yours.
The gateway prices an instance pays are those of the gateway it was placed on. When Gigahost changes them, the instance takes the new prices after 90 days with a notice, as with a provider’s prices.
Changing a home instance’s gateway, to another tier or to another location, makes it pay the new gateway’s prices from the change on, and carries the creation fee once more: a change is never cheaper than renting anew. The charge is refunded if the change fails for a reason other than yours. A change that Gigahost asks of you, because the instance’s gateway is being taken out of service, is free.

Address charges of a cloud instance

A cloud instance whose provider charges for its public address pays that monthly price for as long as the instance is billed.
Without --gateway-tier, a cloud instance gets a Dedicated IP, at the offering’s address_microusd_per_month.
A cloud instance’s Shared IP is included: it costs nothing beyond the instance’s price (the shared_ip entry’s monthly price is 0, shown as “included”), and its traffic is at twice the provider’s rate (see Traffic).
A change of the address price takes effect after 90 days with a notice, as the provider’s other prices do.

Price changes

Pending price changes are on the instance’s Overview under Price and in Notices, with the exact time they take effect, at least 90 days after the notice.

When Gigahost changes how much more a cloud instance’s Shared IP pays for traffic, a rise reaches the instance after 90 days with a notice, and a reduction at once. It changes once a day at most.

SLA credits

When a provider’s host is down, each affected instance earns an SLA credit: its base price for the downtime (less Gigahost’s own fixed price per instance, which is not the provider’s and is $0 today), times the multiplier of the SLA tier it was rented with (1×, 5×, or 20×). Time when the fault was the platform’s own does not count.

The credit is kept for you at that provider. It pays that provider’s later charges before your balance does: the provider’s share of your instances’ usage, and local backup creation, restore, and storage on its hosts.
It cannot be withdrawn, and it does not pay gateway charges, hosted backups, creation charges, or balance holds. When your account is closed, the credit left goes back to the provider that gave it; your balance is what is refunded.
ghost account balance lists your credit per provider apart from your balance, and ghost account sla-credits lists each credit.
Billing › SLA credits (/billing/sla-credits) lists each credit with its instance, provider and downtime.

Backups

Backup creation and restore carry separate one-time charges, and a backup you keep is charged for its storage. The prices are the platform’s, the same on every host, and come from the public backup-pricing catalog:

Backup	Creation	Restore	Storage
Hosted, off the host	$0.005 per GB	$0.005 per GB	$0.03 per GB per month
Local, on the instance’s host	$0.001 per GB	$0.001 per GB	$0.01 per GB per month

Displayed GB/TB units mean GiB/TiB. Prices are per GiB. The ledger rounds artifact bytes upward to MiB and then rounds the micro-USD amount upward.
The traffic of a backup, its upload and the download of a restore, is not charged.
These prices apply to the backup’s compressed size: a backup is charged for its own size, the compressed and encrypted artifact, which is usually much less than the disk.

When a backup is charged

Nothing is held for a backup. It is charged once, when the finished backup is published, after a hosted backup’s upload has completed: for the size of the compressed and encrypted artifact, and for no more than the size of the volume.

A backup that fails or that you cancel before is charged nothing.
A scheduled backup is charged as one made by hand, at the prices in force when its run starts: setting the schedule is your consent to each run’s charge. A run your balance cannot pay, or that would leave less than your protected balance, is skipped and charged nothing; its history says why.
The artifact’s size is not known before it is made, so Gigahost accepts a backup while what a backup as large as the volume would cost leaves your protected balance of your balance. Otherwise it does not accept the backup and answers insufficient_balance, and the message names the amounts.
In ghost account history the charge is one row (backup_creation) with the instance.
A restore’s exact immutable-artifact charge is posted when its job is accepted and is non-refundable.

Who is paid, and storage

A local backup’s creation, restore, and storage are paid to the provider of its host, from your SLA credit at that provider first. A hosted backup’s are paid to the platform.
Restore and retained-storage prices are copied to the backup when it is created, so later price changes do not affect it.
Retained storage is charged at the per-GB/month price the backup recorded, using a fixed 30-day month. It is billed in 15-minute intervals until the delete job has removed the artifact.
Hosted retained storage initially costs $0.03/GB per fixed 30-day month and is billed in the same 15-minute intervals until deletion completes.
Deleting an instance does not delete its retained backups, which stay billed (Delete).

What `ghost` signs

The CLI signs the operation, resource IDs, destination, current price revision, maximum charge, and idempotency key with the separate billing key derived from your active account key. If you use an older account key for a pre-rotation backup, the active account key still signs this new paid operation.

Ceilings

Platform ceilings cap the creation and the restore of a backup at $0.01/GB and its storage at $0.03/GB/month.
A provider’s traffic price is limited to approximately $50/TB; a cloud instance’s Shared IP pays twice it.
The WAN and LAN mesh prices are limited to $50/TiB.
Platform-configured prices and charges are bounded by runtime ceilings plus compiled hard maxima, which contain configuration mistakes.

Resource limits

The platform also limits active instances, recent host and instance creations, jobs, backups, login URLs, sessions, authentication keys, and pending host enrollment tokens. The backups an instance keeps (maximum_backups_per_instance) bound its backup schedule too: the rules’ keeps, with one more for each rule, must fit together. A schedule’s runs and deletions are not counted toward the jobs limit, and neither are the jobs the platform starts for your instances, such as the stops of an operator’s hold or of a balance that ran out. Temporary records expire and are removed automatically. Limits and charges are published configuration and may change between requests.

When a provider retires a host

Providers cannot erase host records. An empty enrollment can be retired. Retirement is not accepted while an instance, a host-side instance resource, or a local backup a renter still keeps remains. The retired identity and tenant history stay visible.

A host with active customers is retired with an irrevocable notice of at least seven full days instead.

The host stops taking new instances from the notice on.
The exact server-derived deadline and deletion progress appear on each affected instance.
Instance usage, gateway base charges, and the refundable balance hold stop at that deadline even if cleanup takes longer; resources remain reserved until deletion is confirmed.
Local-backup billing also stops at the deadline, while hosted backups remain available.

A provider can give the same minimum notice for one instance without draining the host.

Where you see your charges

The website’s Billing page and ghost account history list what was charged; Managing instances says where to find them.

Billing › Charges and credits

The Charges and credits tab totals your charges and credits per UTC day, or per month: a row for each kind of charge and instance.

The Minimum amount filter ($0.01, $0.10, $1, $10 or $100) leaves out the totals of smaller amounts. It starts at $0.10 for months and $0.01 for days. The account totals endpoint takes it as min_amount_microusd.
Each row has the part of your balance it moved (available, reserved, or SLA credit at a provider), the Amount it was for, and its Cost.
The amount is how many for a creation fee, the time charged for an instance’s usage or a gateway’s base price, the size of a backup’s creation or restore, and for backup storage the total size of the backups kept in that day or month (those made before it ended and not deleted before it began).
An instance’s usage also says its traffic and average CPU load, such as “1 day, 1.5 GiB traffic, 25% CPU”; a home instance’s says “gateway traffic”, as its usage’s traffic is its gateway’s.
A home instance’s gateway charges are in the row of its usage, which costs both; the Gateway kind shows its base price alone.
A cloud instance’s address charges are rows of the Address kind, with the time charged for.
A home instance’s mesh traffic is in rows of the Traffic kind, with the size sent over each path, such as “40 GiB WAN mesh, 10 GiB LAN mesh” (the account totals’ traffic_paths); each entry of the history names its path, WAN mesh or LAN mesh (traffic_path wan_mesh or lan_mesh, and gateway for a home instance’s usage).
Deposits, credits and balance holds have no amount.

Above the tabs’ lists, Available is what you can spend, Reserved what your instances hold until they are deleted, and Total credit both.

An instance’s Usage tab

Under Charges, the Usage tab shows what each period was charged for traffic, for CPU usage above the base price, and in all. A 15-minute period’s charges show once it is billed.

A home instance’s Usage tab also has its paths: Gateway, the usage above, and WAN mesh and LAN mesh, what the instance sent over the host mesh each period, which is billed at the path’s price, and what it received, which is free. These are the bytes its charges were made of. The instance’s Mesh tab shows each of its links with what it carried (Managing instances).

Monthly spending

Billing shows, after the balance, Monthly spending: what the coming 30 days will cost at your current use, noted as projected spending based on the last 30 days of usage. It has a row each for Instances (their base charges, with a home instance’s gateway and a cloud instance’s address), Traffic (the provider’s, the gateway’s and the mesh’s) and Backups (local and hosted together), and the Total. Each row adds up the projections of its services:

An instance’s projection is its average daily charge over the days it existed in the past 30 (today included), times 30. An instance started 3 days ago counts as if it had run all 30 days at the rate of those 3; one less than a day old with no charge yet counts its current monthly price. An instance whose billing ends within the 30 days, as when its host is being retired, counts up to then.
A backup’s projection is its storage price for the month, or up to when its storage billing ends, when that comes sooner. Only backups that exist count: a backup schedule’s backups count once it has made them, as backups made by hand do, and its runs to come are not projected.
Only recurring charges count: usage, traffic, gateway and address charges, and backup storage. Creation and restore charges, a scheduled run’s included, holds, refunds and credits are left out, and so are instances that were deleted or failed or whose billing ended, and backups that were deleted; their charges stay in the history.

When your available balance does not last the 30 days at that rate, the section says how many days it lasts. A live trial credit pays first, until it runs out or expires, and credit at a provider pays for that provider’s services until it runs out, as they pay your charges. While the balance shows a funding notice, the notice says when the balance runs out, and the section does not say it again. An instance’s Usage tab shows the same figures for that instance alone: its base, its traffic, and its backups. The CLI keeps its own wording: ghost account balance adds the account’s projection under projected_monthly_charges, and ghost instance usage the instance’s; with --json it is the projection of each answer.

`ghost account history`

ghost account history --limit 50

ghost account history lists each entry on its own. It prints one line per entry: its time, kind, the part of your balance it moves (available, reserved, or credit at a provider), the amount, and the instance it is for; --json adds each entry’s breakdown and transaction_id. --cursor, taken from the preceding response, gives the next page.

If your balance runs low

The warning

Gigahost warns you when your unlocked balance, with your SLA credit at providers where it pays part of your costs, is projected to run out within seven days.
Adding funds or deleting instances

Funds that cover more than seven days end the warning. Deleting instances you do not need also helps: held balance pays no charge, and each hold comes back to your available balance when its instance is deleted.
A zero balance

If your unlocked balance reaches zero, Gigahost stops further instance, gateway, and ordinary-backup billing at once. It then stops each instance, creates an encrypted final backup where local or hosted capacity is available, deletes your other backups, and deletes the instance.
Recovering

After you top up, you can select a current offering and create a replacement from the final backup with ghost instance create --backup <BACKUP_UUID>.
A second zero balance

If the unlocked balance later reaches zero again, all remaining billable final recovery backups are deleted.

The warning

The projection uses your recent recurring spend and your currently committed base, gateway, and backup-storage costs.
The warning and estimated exhaustion time appear with your account balance and as a notice in ghost account notifications, which names your available balance, the daily cost it runs out at, and the balance holds of your instances.
Adding funds that cover more than seven days again ends the warning, and so does a day in which nothing was billed: its notice is marked read, and a funding_warning_resolved notice says why.

The final recovery backup

Recurring charges cannot push the platform into extending unlimited credit. The work done at a zero balance continues through restarts of Gigahost and of providers, and retries are bounded.

Automatic backups from this process are marked final_recovery in backup listings (purpose: final_recovery in ghost backup list). That permanent marker identifies the restoration source for a force-deleted instance, and it does not change if the source instance no longer exists.
The website’s Backups page highlights them.
Final-backup creation itself is waived; its stored restore price and retained-storage price still apply.
Deleting the instance unlocks its refundable balance hold, and that balance keeps paying for the final recovery backup.