Pricing

Deploy on Ownkube from a prepaid wallet, metered per minute for what you actually run. Managed Postgres, automatic TLS, logs, metrics, autoscaling, and rollbacks are built in. No cloud account, no cluster to provision, no card to start browsing. When you want your own data boundary, the same app runs in your own AWS account (an option, covered at the end).

Plans

Push a repo or a container and get a live URL in seconds. Your monthly plan loads wallet credit each cycle, and per-minute usage draws it down. When the balance reaches zero, apps pause with their data retained until you top up or the next monthly load arrives. There is no free tier on Ownkube-hosted compute.

Personal

$5 / month.

Loads $5 of wallet credit each month
300 build minutes / month included
One organization
Community support

Team

$20 / month.

Loads $20 of wallet credit each month
1,500 build minutes / month included
Unlimited organizations, organization roles, shared billing
Priority build capacity and email support

Need volume pricing, SSO, audit logging, an SLA, or a compliance review? Contact us about Enterprise. It is set up by our team, not self-serve.

How the wallet works

Your plan loads credit monthly, and per-minute usage draws it down. Unused wallet credit rolls over to the next month and never expires: the dollar balance stays on your account and each monthly load adds to it, so a light month is not wasted. (This applies to the wallet balance only. The monthly build-minutes allowance resets each month and does not roll over.) Run past the loaded credit and you can top up any time (any amount, from a $5 minimum) to keep going. When the balance reaches zero, the account is suspended with its data retained: apps scale to zero, nothing is deleted, and adding credit or the next monthly load resumes them.

Spend limits

So a bill can’t run away, set a monthly budget on your account and choose what happens when month-to-date spend reaches it:

Notify — your apps keep running and Ownkube emails the account owner. A soft cap you want to watch, not enforce.
Pause apps — workloads scale to zero at the cap. Data is retained, and raising the budget resumes them. This is the hard stop.

Spending alerts email the account owner as spend approaches the budget, at 50%, 80%, and 100% of the cap, at most once per calendar month. Spend limits sit on top of the prepaid wallet, which still suspends the account at a zero balance regardless of any budget you set. Find them on the Billing page under Spend limits.

What you are billed for

Line	How it meters
CPU	Metered on actual per-minute usage, up to the limit you set. A mostly-idle app barely registers.
Memory	Metered on the working set the app actually holds, per minute, for as long as it runs.
Databases	Always billed reserved: full requested vCPU and memory, continuously, for as long as the database exists.
Bandwidth	100 GB egress included per account, then about $0.09 / GB.

Rates are about $0.00041 / vCPU-minute and $0.0001 / GiB-minute of working set, metered per minute. That puts a typical workload roughly a third under the equivalent Railway bill. 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.

Region: us-east-1 today, flat pricing. More regions on request.

Reserved boxes (optional)

Metered is the default and fits most personal software. A workload that wants a predictable flat monthly price instead of a per-minute meter can opt into a reserved box: a fixed-size box that bills a flat rate for as long as it exists, busy or idle. Reserved boxes draw the same prepaid wallet.

Spark boxes share a vCPU (they can burst when the node has room) with guaranteed memory. Spark is how a small app fits in a $5 box.
Core boxes reserve a dedicated vCPU for steady workloads that want a guaranteed core.

Box	vCPU	Memory	Price
Spark 1	0.25 vCPU (shared)	0.5 GiB	$5 / mo
Spark 2	0.5 vCPU (shared)	1 GiB	$10 / mo
Spark 3	1 vCPU (shared)	2 GiB	$19 / mo
Core 2	2 vCPU	4 GiB	$58 / mo
Core 4	4 vCPU	8 GiB	$116 / mo
Core 8	8 vCPU	16 GiB	$232 / mo
Core 2-Mem	2 vCPU	8 GiB	$76 / mo
Core 4-Mem	4 vCPU	16 GiB	$152 / mo

Metered and reserved are per-workload and switchable. Databases are always reserved and do not use the Spark or Core boxes.

Build minutes

Every deployment that builds from source runs a build in Ownkube’s build capacity. Each plan includes a monthly build-minutes allowance; past it, build minutes draw the prepaid wallet at a per-minute rate. The allowance resets each month and does not roll over.

Tier	Included build minutes / mo	Overage
Personal ($5 / mo)	300	$0.007 / build minute
Team ($20 / mo)	1,500	$0.005 / build minute

A build minute is one wall-clock minute of a build, counted the same regardless of builder size, with a 30-minute cap per build.

How Ownkube compares

Heroku, Railway, and Render are all solid platforms. Figures below are approximate and change over time (as of 2026); check each vendor’s pricing page for current rates.

Dimension	Ownkube	Heroku	Railway	Render
Starting price	$5 / mo	$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	Low, metered	Dynos sleep on Eco	Low, metered	Free tier sleeps
Managed Postgres	Built in	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

Running in your own cloud (optional)

Prefer to keep workloads in your own AWS account, with your own data boundary and your own bill? Run the same app there with the same workflow, dashboard, and observability. It is an option, not a requirement. You pay AWS directly for compute; Ownkube meters a small platform fee on the Production shape (free on Starter). AWS is supported today, with GCP and Azure coming soon.

Starter (K3s on one AWS instance)

Free forever, no card required. Runs on one AWS instance.

$0 Ownkube platform fee
Unlimited deployments on that instance
Automatic TLS on generated hostnames
You pay AWS directly for the instance (from ~$30 / month on t3.medium)

Production (managed EKS)

$5 per vCPU + $1 per GiB RAM, prorated per second on requested resources.

Highly available across availability zones
Metered on the vCPU and memory your deployments request
You pay AWS (EKS + EC2 + storage) directly

The meter ticks on requested resources, not capacity your app happens to use. Set honest requests and you know your bill. Enterprise (volume, dedicated support, scoped compliance) is available on request.

Worked example (own cloud)

A small production app on EKS: one web service (2 vCPU / 4 GiB) and a worker (1 vCPU / 2 GiB).

Line	Monthly
Ownkube platform fee: 3 vCPU × $5 + 6 GiB × $1	~$21
EKS control plane (AWS)	~$73
Worker nodes (AWS, mixed capacity)	~$100
Total	~$194

The same app on a Starter cluster (t3.large) is ~$60 / month, all of it the EC2 instance, with a $0 Ownkube platform fee.

FAQ

Is there a free tier?

Ownkube-hosted compute has no free tier; the smallest plan is Personal at $5 a month. If you run in your own AWS account, the Starter shape (K3s on one AWS instance) has no Ownkube platform fee.

How is Ownkube metered?

Per minute, from a prepaid wallet. CPU meters on actual usage and memory on the working set your app holds. A metered workload scaled to 0 replicas stops metering. Databases are always billed reserved.

Can I cap my monthly spend?

Yes. Set a monthly budget and choose to be notified at the cap or to have your apps pause (scale to zero, data retained) when month-to-date spend reaches it. Spending alerts email the account owner at 50%, 80%, and 100% of the budget. See Spend limits.

What does an idle app cost?

Very little on a metered deployment. CPU bills only while it runs; you still pay for the memory it holds, which draws your monthly wallet credit. A reserved box bills its flat rate whether busy or idle.

Can I move between hosted and my own cloud later?

Yes. The application code, push-to-deploy workflow, dashboard, and observability are the same, so moving is a configuration change, not a rewrite.

Cost optimization How to keep an idle app cheap and right-size what you run.

Clusters The Starter vs Production shape split for running in your own cloud.