Billing

Lakeday sells managed Walleye instances. You pay for the instances you run, plus storage and egress above what those instances include. There are no plans, no organization fee and no per-seat charge: add as many members in as many roles as you like, and none of them costs anything. Support is email for everyone.

Instance rates

Every instance is always on and billed per second while it runs, at one hourly rate for its shape and cache tier. A launch rate covers all three of its nodes. A billing month is 730 hours.

Shape	Cache	Per hour	Per month
ramp	small	$0.054	$39
ramp	medium	$0.108	$79
ramp	large	$0.204	$149
ramp	xlarge	$0.410	$299
launch	small	$1.095	$799
launch	medium	$2.053	$1,499
launch	large	$4.108	$2,999
launch	xlarge	$8.218	$5,999

An instance bills every second from start to stop. A stopped instance runs no nodes and bills no instance time; it costs storage only.

Storage and egress

Resource	Included each billing month	Additional usage
Object storage	10 GB per ramp instance, 100 GB per launch instance	$0.05/GB-month
Egress	100 GB per organization	$0.05/GB

• Storage is the size of each instance’s object storage, sampled hourly and summed across the organization. Only capacity above what its instances include is charged; a stopped instance still contributes its included capacity, a deleted one does not. One GB-month equals 730 GB-hours.
• Egress measures response bodies leaving the instance endpoint. Traffic inside an instance, and between an instance and its object storage, is excluded.

Allowances reset on the subscription’s monthly billing date and do not roll over.

What is metered

Instance time is metered to the second from the time the instance’s nodes actually ran. Nothing is estimated, and nothing is rounded up to a whole minute.

What is metered is the time your instance was up, not the number of nodes it took to keep it up. A launch instance’s three nodes are one instance on the meter, and if maintenance of ours ever runs an extra node alongside yours for part of a minute, that node is not charged for either: you asked for an instance, and an instance is what is billed.

Deleting an instance settles everything it ran that has not been billed yet before its records are erased. An instance that lived for less than a minute is still billed for the seconds it ran, and a deleted instance keeps its line on the billing page for the rest of the period.

Stopping and starting settles the same way. Restarting an instance in the same minute you stopped it costs you exactly the time it was running, no more and no less.

So does resizing. An instance resized from ramp small to launch small is charged for its whole ramp phase at the ramp rate and its whole launch phase at the launch rate, with no gap between them and no second on both.

The billing page lists every instance of the period with the hours it ran and what those hours cost at its rate, plus the storage and egress gauges. A running instance’s hours are exact as of the last completed minute; the usage summaries behind storage and egress can take several minutes to update.

Free month

Your first ramp small instance is free for 30 days, with no card. The 30 days start when you create that instance. Nothing is billed while the workspace is on its free month.

Without a payment method:

• creating a second instance is refused with 402, asking for a payment method;
• creating any shape or cache tier other than ramp small is refused the same way;
• resizing the free instance away from ramp small is refused the same way.

The free month is once per workspace and once per person. Deleting the free instance and creating another does not restart the 30 days, and a person who has already had a free month does not get another one in a new workspace.

When the 30 days end without a payment method, Lakeday stops the instance. Its data is kept, and starting it returns 402 until a payment method is on file. Adding a card at any time, before or after that, keeps the instance running or lets it start again, and billing starts from that moment. None of the free days is ever billed.

Paying

Adding a payment method on the Billing page opens the workspace’s metered subscription and lifts every restriction: any shape, any cache tier, as many instances as you want. Instance, storage and egress usage is collected in arrears at monthly renewal, on the subscription’s billing date. Renewal invoices allow 24 hours for delayed usage receipts before automatic collection. There are no mid-month usage threshold charges.

Closing a workspace

Closing a workspace is three deliberate steps, in this order. Nothing here happens as a side effect of something else: no step moves money except the one you take to stop the charges, and each step is refused until the one before it is done.

1. Delete every instance. Deleting an instance destroys it and every table in its object storage. Do this from the instances list, one instance at a time. Deleting an instance is never gated by billing.
2. Cancel the subscription on the Billing page. This is the only thing that ends a paid subscription, and it is refused with 409 while the organization still has an instance that has not been deleted. The message names the instances to delete first. Cancelling stops future charges. It starts no charge and refunds nothing of its own: Stripe issues its normal final invoice for the usage already accrued in the period. Cancelling again once it is cancelled does nothing and is not an error. A workspace that never had a subscription has nothing to cancel and can go straight to the next step.
3. Delete the organization from Settings. This removes its members, tokens and every remaining record. It performs no billing operation at all, and it is refused with 409 while the organization has an active subscription, asking you to cancel it first.

Deleting the organization is also refused while storage the organization still holds has not gone with its instances, or while usage it accrued has not yet been billed. Retrying once that finishes completes the deletion.

Members

Members are access control only: Lakeday never counts them and never charges for them.