How hourly billing works

An hourly service has a price per hour instead of a monthly or yearly price. Coritan takes that price from your credit balance each hour the service runs, and stops charging for the month once you reach the monthly cap. There is no renewal invoice. Container Apps servers and Cloud Compute instances can be billed hourly, when their plan has an hourly price.

You can order an hourly plan once you have added at least $10.00 of credit in total, by default. Credit you add by card, PayPal, checkout page, automatic top-up or cryptocurrency all counts. Once unlocked, hourly billing stays unlocked when your balance falls again.

Until then, an hourly order is refused with You must deposit at least $10 before using hourly billing services. Add credit to your balance to unlock it.

Ordering an hourly service raises a first invoice for one hour's price, plus any setup fee and the first period of each add-on ordered with it. After that, Coritan checks every hourly service once an hour:

• A Container Apps server is charged for the hour when it is running at the check. A stopped server costs nothing.
• A Cloud Compute instance is charged for every hour it exists, stopped or running, until you cancel it. Only a suspended instance costs nothing.

Each charge takes one hour's price from your credit. Hourly charges are not invoiced and do not appear on the Transactions tab. The service's Billing tab shows what it has cost this month as Used this month, and the API lists each charge as Hourly charge for service #311, with your service's number.

Each hourly service has a monthly cap: 672 hours of its hourly price by default, set when you order it. For example, a plan at $0.0200/hr caps at $13.44 a month. Once a service's charges for the month reach the cap, Coritan stops charging it until the 1st of the next month, when every hourly service starts again from zero. The service keeps running.

Used this month shows the cap beside what you have used, for example $4.12 of $13.44 cap.

When your credit cannot cover the next hour, Coritan first tries an automatic top-up, if you turned it on. If that fails or is off, Coritan suspends the service with the reason Insufficient credit balance.

Cancel the service on its Billing tab. An hourly service ends at once and its charges stop from the next hour (Cancel a service). Stopping a Cloud Compute instance does not stop its charges.

• Add credit to your balance
• Turn on automatic top-up
• Transactions and payment attempts

GET /billing/hourly-eligibility says whether you can order an hourly plan:

curl https://api.coritan.com/api/v1/billing/hourly-eligibility \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CORITAN_TOKEN"

{
  "eligible": false,
  "total_deposited": 5.0,
  "minimum_required": 10.0,
  "remaining": 5.0
}

total_deposited is all the credit you have added, minimum_required the amount that unlocks hourly billing and remaining what is still needed, all in US dollars.

A service's hourly figures are in GET /services/{service_ref}: amount is the hourly price, monthly_cap the cap, hourly_usage_this_month what it has cost this month and hourly_cap_reached whether it has hit the cap. The hourly charges themselves are in recent_transactions from GET /billing/credit, which returns your last 20 credit movements (Billing overview).