Usage & billing

How it works

Five sentences cover the whole model.

You add funds to your workspace balance. Running infrastructure is metered hourly against that prepaid balance. Every workspace gets a free app, a free database and unlimited static sites. Nothing charges you for having an account, and nothing charges you for deploying. When you delete a resource, it stops costing money immediately.

There is no plan to choose and no card kept on file. Billing shows your balance, what a full month costs at your current configuration, and roughly how long the balance covers that.

What is metered

Every size and its price is on the pricing page, and the create form shows an estimate before you make anything.

Three consequences worth knowing.

• You pay for what you provisioned, not what you used. A service capped at 1 GB costs the same whether it sits idle or runs hot. That is deliberate. A bill that moves with how busy your app happened to be is a bill you cannot predict.
• A running service costs whether or not it is receiving traffic. A dev service left up over a quiet month still accrues hours. Stop what you are not using.
• Cron jobs are charged for the time they actually run. A job that takes 40 seconds a night costs about 20 minutes a month, not a month.

What is never charged

Deployments, redeploys and rollbacks. Build compute. Git integration. Custom domains and their SSL certificates. Environment variables and secret files. Creating projects, environments and teams. Inviting teammates. Logs and basic metrics. API and CLI access. Transfer between services in the same region.

We charge for infrastructure. We do not charge for using the platform.

Region pricing

Apps and databases in af-west (Port Harcourt) cost 1.5 times the eu-west price: Nigerian capacity costs more to run, and the premium pays for in-region latency and data that stays in Nigeria. Services created in af-west before 20 October 2026 keep the 1.2 times they were created at. Prices on the pricing page are eu-west prices. Object storage costs 1.2 times as much in af-west.

The free tier

Every workspace can run these at no charge:

• One free app. A web service or cron job at the Free size (0.25 CPU, 256 MB). A free web service sleeps after 15 minutes without visitors and wakes on the next visit, in under a minute. Paid sizes never sleep.
• One free database. PostgreSQL, Redis or Valkey at the Free size, with a 1 GB disk. MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB start at the Dev size.
• Unlimited static sites. Always free, whether built from a repo or uploaded, and they don't use your free app.

A free app or database that has had no deploys and no visits or connections for 30 days is stopped, so the free servers stay quick for the people using them. We email the workspace owners a week before, and again when it stops. Nothing is deleted: press Resume on the service and it starts again with its data, settings and domains.

The limit is counted per workspace and per person, so opening a second workspace does not give you a second free app. Anything bigger than the Free size, or a second app or database, is metered from your balance.

Each month every workspace also gets 1,000 emails, 5 GB of object storage and 100 GB of egress before metering starts. Egress past that is ₦40 a GB. These allowances do not accumulate: whatever is unused at the end of the month is gone.

Argus, Naijacloud's monitoring, has a Free plan too. Its Pro and Scale plans come out of the same balance by the hour. Compare them on the pricing page, and see Argus plans.

Preview environments

Every pull request gets its own preview environment, and the first 24 hours are free. After that it draws from your balance at half the standard rate.

The free window belongs to the pull request, not to each deployment. Pushing more commits redeploys the preview. It does not hand out another free day.

We email you an hour before a preview starts costing money, and Billing shows a live countdown for each open pull request. When the pull request is merged or closed, the preview stops on its own and so does the charge.

Spending controls

Three settings, all on the Billing page.

• Low balance alerts. Tell us the figure to warn you at. You get one email when the balance drops below it, and the alert re-arms after you top up.
• Usage alerts. Get told when you reach 50%, 75%, 90% or 100% of your spending limit. These need a spending limit set, since a percentage needs something to be a percentage of.
• Spending limit. A monthly maximum. When you reach it, your protection policy takes over.

What happens when you run out

Preview environments stop as soon as your balance reaches zero. Paid apps and cron jobs stop after three days, and paid databases and caches after seven, unless you add funds. We email you before anything stops, with the date it will stop.

Free services and static sites are never stopped for an unpaid balance, and neither is object storage.

Nothing goes into arrears. Usage we could not charge is shown on your statement and written off. You will not be presented with a bill you did not agree to.

Adding funds

Add funds takes you to a hosted checkout. Pay by bank transfer or card, in Naira.

Your balance moves when the payment settles, not when you land back on the success page. A bank transfer clears in minutes, so give it a moment and the page updates.

Funds do not expire. Top-ups are not refundable to card, so add what you expect to spend rather than parking a large amount.

Top-up bonus

A single large top-up earns extra credit:

The bonus is worked out on what actually arrived, and added to your balance as its own line, Top-up bonus, as soon as the payment settles. A workspace can receive up to ₦50,000 of bonus in any 12 months. Refunds and other credits never earn a bonus. The Add funds sheet shows what the amount you picked will earn.

Automatic top-up

You can ask Naijacloud to prompt you when your balance drops below a figure you choose. Set the threshold and the amount. When you cross it you get a notification with a one-tap link to add exactly that amount.

Transaction history

Every movement on your balance is listed with the date, what it was for, the amount, and the balance it left behind. Filter by top-ups, usage, refunds or credits, and open any row for its reference.

Quote that reference (NC-TX-...) if you contact support about a charge.

Statements

At the end of each month you get a statement: everything metered, what the free allowances covered, and what was taken. It is a record, not a demand. Every figure on it was already settled hourly.

Download it for whoever does your books.

Keeping the bill down

• Size services honestly. dev and uat rarely need production sizes. See Instance types & regions.
• Delete what you finished with. Preview environments clean themselves up. Services you created by hand do not.
• Serve heavy assets from a bucket rather than baking them into a build.
• Keep traffic in-region. Transfer inside a region is free. Crossing between regions is not.
• Use a static site for a front end with no server logic. A static site has no instance to pay for.

Related: Instance types & regions and Preview deploys.