How does pricing work?

[greg]

Hi,

You can basically consider usage under $5 a month as being free:

questions on 100% billing discount

We shipped a change a few months ago to waive invoices under $5. We haven’t had any reason to disable it yet, it seems to be useful. A surprising number of people pay <$5 by accident and charging them creates a negative experience. And, the reality is we make money off bigger spenders. We’re actually considering ditching the free tier altogether and just making this the free tier. I think it sets a good expectation (these services are worth money, we’re electing not to charge you, but it’s defi…

The free builder is, yep, free. That one isn’t counted in your usage and doesn’t count in the 3 vms given as an example. Ignore that builder. Yes you can remove it but a new one will just come back, so don’t.

You can leave your VM running 24/7. As you can see on the pricing page, leaving 1 of the shared-cpu 256MB RAM VMs for a whole month is under $5. No problem with that.