The billing team is working on improving invoices. One of the big sources of billing confusion comes from the various “allowances” we provide. At time of writing, there are two different ways you might end up not having to pay for your usage:
free allowances for machines, volumes and outbound data transfer- all of our plans (except for the Legacy Hobby plan) come with some amount of included usage
At the moment, we implement free allowances using tiered pricing. For example, the first 8,436,960 seconds of shared CPU usage is billed at $0/second and subsequent usage is billed at the rate we quote on our pricing page.
That’s really confusing. Both the magic number and the fact that you see a weird tiered breakdown of usage on your invoice. We want to just say “you get $6/month of free shared-cpu-1x usage.”
Included usage from plans does sort of work like this, with a caveat: we only add a line item to deduct the cost of your included usage at the end of the month. This is an awkward experience, since you don’t have a great sense of what you’re going to end up having to pay until you get the invoice with everything on it! We want to be able to show you your included usage being consumed throughout the month, so you’re better able to predict costs.
Both of these ideas can be quite handily represented as credits. We can have separate buckets for each free allowance and for included usage, i.e. you’ll have a shared CPU seconds credit bucket, a volumes credit bucket, one outbound data transfer credit bucket for each of the three tiers, and an included usage credit bucket.
You’ll be able to see in much clearer detail how much of each free allowance you’ve consumed throughout the course of the month. Here’s an idea of the vague information architecture we’re considering for our invoices:
Just to set expectations: this is definitely not the final UI! We’re still in the middle of working out how best to present information on invoices. If you have thoughts that you haven’t already let us know about in another thread, share them below!