Ownkube bills from a prepaid wallet. Top it up yourself on Pay as you go, or let a plan load credit every month. Apps draw the wallet down per minute for the CPU and memory they actually use; databases, caches and reserved boxes draw it at a flat rate while they run. Nothing here needs a cloud account.
Pay as you go
No subscription.
Personal
$5 / month.
Team
$20 / month.
Pick a plan or top up on the Billing page, or from the terminal with okctl billing subscribe personal and okctl billing top-up 10. Enterprise is custom and not self-serve: contact us.
The service limit counts every service of any kind, sleeping or not. The vCPU and memory limit counts each service at its CPU and memory limits (or its box size), times its replicas:
Limits are checked when you create or change a service, never when one wakes. Turning sleep off on a service counts it as always-on from then on.
On Pay as you go you top up the wallet yourself; on a plan it loads credit monthly. Per-minute usage draws it down. Unused wallet credit rolls over and never expires: the dollar balance stays on your account and each monthly load adds to it, so a light month is not wasted. The monthly build-minutes allowance is the exception; it resets each month and does not roll over.
Run past the loaded credit and you can top up any time (any amount from $5) to keep going. When the balance reaches zero the account is suspended with its data retained: every service stops, nothing is deleted, the owner gets a daily reminder, and adding credit or the next monthly load resumes everything. An account left suspended for exhaustion for 7 days has its Compute resources deleted, so top up or set a spend limit that pauses before the wallet runs dry. A budget pause never deletes anything.
| Line | How it meters |
|---|---|
| CPU | Actual per-minute usage, up to the limit you set. A mostly-idle app barely registers. |
| Memory | The working set the app actually holds, per minute, for as long as it runs. |
| Reserved boxes | A flat monthly price while the box runs, busy or idle. Asleep, a box bills only its storage. |
| Databases | Always a flat-priced box while running, plus storage at $0.25 / GB / month per replica. A sleeping database bills storage only. |
| Caches | Always a flat-priced box while running. No storage charge; a sleeping cache bills nothing. |
| Build minutes | Time spent building from source, by the minute. Plans include an allowance. |
| Bandwidth | Outbound traffic per GB at the region’s rate: $0.13 / GB in the Mumbai region, $0.02 / GB in the Germany region. Inbound and in-region traffic are free. |
Metered rates are about $18 per vCPU and $4.50 per GiB a month ($0.00041 / vCPU-minute and $0.0001 / GiB-minute). You set a CPU limit and a memory limit per workload, or take a preset. These are ceilings, not a fixed price: the bill follows the meter, not the size you pick. The live meter is on the Usage page.
Metered is the default and fits most personal software. A workload that runs flat-out all month, or that needs guaranteed CPU, can opt into a reserved box: a fixed-size compute box at a flat monthly price. Switch on the deployment’s Settings tab under Billing mode, or set billingMode to reserved with a skuId in a manifest.
| Box | vCPU | Memory | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spark 1 | 0.25 vCPU | 0.5 GiB | $5 / mo |
| Spark 2 | 0.5 vCPU | 1 GiB | $10 / mo |
| Spark 3 | 1 vCPU | 2 GiB | $19 / mo |
| Core 2 | 2 vCPU (dedicated) | 4 GiB | $58 / mo |
| Core 4 | 4 vCPU (dedicated) | 8 GiB | $116 / mo |
| Core 8 | 8 vCPU (dedicated) | 16 GiB | $232 / mo |
| Core 2-Mem | 2 vCPU (dedicated) | 8 GiB | $76 / mo |
| Core 4-Mem | 4 vCPU (dedicated) | 16 GiB | $152 / mo |
okctl boxes list --kind web prints the same table with the ids a manifest takes.
Managed Postgres is always a flat-priced box plus storage. The three smallest boxes are available on every tier. DB 4 and up need a plan. Dedicated boxes, with a dedicated vCPU, need Team.
| Box | Price | Tier |
|---|---|---|
| DB 0.5 | $4 / mo | every tier |
| DB 1 | $8 / mo | every tier |
| DB 2 | $12 / mo | every tier |
| DB 4 | $28 / mo | Personal and Team |
| DB 8 | $54 / mo | Personal and Team |
| DB 16 | $104 / mo | Personal and Team |
| Dedicated 4 / 8 / 16 | $48 / $96 / $192 / mo | Team |
Storage is $0.25 / GB / month per replica, and a standby replica doubles the box price. Backups with 7-day point-in-time recovery are included on Personal and Team, off by default and turned on per database. Specs for each box are on the Postgres page.
Valkey caches run from $2 / mo (0.25 GiB) to $16 / mo (4 GiB), with the 0.25, 0.5 and 1 GiB boxes on every tier and the larger ones on a plan. See Valkey sizes.
Building from source (a repository or okctl up) is billed by the minute while the builder runs. Pulling a pre-built image costs nothing.
| Tier | Included build minutes / mo | Rate past the allowance |
|---|---|---|
| Pay as you go | none | $0.01 / build minute, 15-minute cap per build |
| Personal ($5 / mo) | 300 | $0.007 / build minute |
| Team ($20 / mo) | 1,500 | $0.005 / build minute |
The Small and Standard builders are available on every tier; the Large builder and priority build capacity come with Team. Pick the builder on the deployment’s Builder tab. See Builds.
Approximate, as of October 2026. Competitor figures are their published list prices.
| Dimension | Ownkube | Heroku | Railway | Render |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | No plan, top up from $5 | $5 / mo (Eco) | $5 / mo (Hobby) | $7 / mo (Starter) |
| Pricing model | Metered per minute | Fixed dyno tiers | Metered per minute | Fixed instance tiers |
| Idle app cost | Nothing while asleep | Dynos sleep on Eco | Low, metered | Free tier sleeps |
| Managed Postgres | Built in | Add-on | Built in | Built in |
| Managed Redis-compatible cache | Built in (Valkey) | Add-on | Built in | Built in |
| Horizontal autoscaling | Included | Add-on or manual | Limited | Paid plans |
| Run in your own AWS | Yes | No | No | No |
The same app can run in your own AWS account: a Starter cluster is free of any Ownkube fee (you pay AWS for one instance), and a Production (EKS) cluster is $5 / vCPU + $1 / GiB RAM a month on what your deployments request. See Clusters.
No. Pay as you go has no subscription: top up the wallet from $5 and deploy. A plan loads credit each month and unlocks more services, Core boxes, every database size, backups and included build minutes.
Yes. Set a monthly budget and choose to be notified or to have everything pause at the cap. Alerts email the owner at 50%, 80% and 100%. See Spend limits.
Almost nothing on the meter, and nothing at all once it sleeps. A sleeping database bills only its storage; a sleeping cache or box bills nothing.
Yes. The deployment configuration is the same on both, so the same app runs in your AWS account with no rewrite and the same dashboard. See Own cloud.
