It's been a long time coming, but we finally published the prices for using Scalarium, including our support package. Long story short: You're paying for what you use. Only want to fire up an instance for an hour? Then in the true spirit of the cloud, we'll only charge you for an hour. No minimum usage, no baseline fee. Simple like that, after all, that's what Amazon does too, right? Scalarium usage costs are on top of Amazon's EC2 fees by the way. We're managing your instances, and we're using your keys. The instances are yours to keep. That way it's easy for you to buy Reserved Instances from Amazon, and reduce your cloud costs by a whole lot.

Anyway, what took us so long you ask? It sure isn't easy to find a pricing model that's cloud-ready, as in: pay only for what you use. However, that usually implies that you either have to somehow get the metering data from Amazon or simply meter the instance usage yourself. At first we refrained from doing the latter, as that'd imply quite some work on our part, and there's a tiny margin of error.

Of course it'd be awesome to be able to access Amazon's metering data through an API. In the sense of Amazon's Web Services, it'd only be logical. No such luck, amigo. Plus, we'd have to fetch them regularly, not just once per month, to always be in the loop about the full usage.

We've considered other options before we ended up deciding on the thing that'd be the hardest to work with: Charge per running instance per month, charge per average number of running instances, charge a monthly base fee on top, that'd include a couple of instances already. We were excited about this payment model at first, but there's problems with it.

It's simply not in the spirit of the cloud. Charging a full month for an instance you've only used for two hours? That just didn't feel right. So we dropped it and thought again, and the result was something that we, in the end, came up with independently. It'd be the only way we could fairly charge based on usage, and that'd enable even small companies to give Scalarium a spin without spending big money from the get go.

So that's where we ended up: No monthly baseline charges, you pay for what you use. Simple like that. After all, there's only work to do on our part when you have instances running. It's the fairest way to pay for a Scalarium's cloud management.

We'll probably add paid add-ons in the future that'll still be charged on a monthly basis, and we'll keep improving Scalarium constantly. If you find something's not to your liking, or you're missing a certain feature, please get in touch.