Billing & your wallet

bootload is prepaid. Each project has a wallet — a chest of coins 🪙 — and everything you run draws down its balance by the second. Top it up, watch the runway, and let auto top-up keep the lights on. No monthly invoice surprises: you only ever spend what's in the chest.

How billing works

Every project has its own wallet with a balance in euros (or US dollars). As your services run, the platform meters usage and debits the wallet:

• Compute — vCPU-seconds and RAM GB-seconds, billed per second a replica is running. Scale to zero (drop anchor) and compute billing stops.
• Storage — persistent volumes and hosted-registry images, billed per GB-month.
• Egress — outbound network traffic. The first 100 GB per project per month is free; beyond that it's €0.01 per GB.
• Dedicated public IPs — €3 per month each, prorated per second you hold one.

Every debit and credit is a row in the wallet ledger, so the balance always equals the sum of its transactions. For the exact, current rates run:

bootload pricing

or open the pricing page in the portal.

Topping up

Add coins to the chest from the portal wallet page or the CLI:

bootload wallet topup --amount 25

Card payments run through Stripe (hosted or embedded checkout, with SCA/3DS handled for you). If your account is VAT-registered, VAT is added on top of the amount you choose — your wallet is always credited the net amount, and VAT never enters the balance. You get a Stripe invoice/receipt for every top-up, linked from the ledger.

Runway warnings

The wallet shows your runway — how long the balance lasts at the current burn rate. As it shrinks, bootload warns you (by notification and email) at roughly 7 days, 3 days, 24 hours, and 1 hour left, so a busy week never ends with services quietly stopping. Each warning fires once per depletion cycle; a top-up resets them.

Auto top-up

Tired of watching the chest? Arm auto top-up to refill automatically when the balance dips below a threshold — from the CLI or the portal wallet page:

bootload wallet auto-topup --threshold 5 --amount 20   # refill +€20 when below €5
bootload wallet auto-topup --off                        # turn it off

The amount is how much to add each time (minimum €10) and the threshold is the balance it refills below. Auto top-up charges your saved card off-session, so make one manual card top-up first to save the card. If a charge is declined, bootload retries with a growing delay and emails you — it never suspends a wallet that still has balance. bootload wallet balance shows whether it's armed.

Spend caps

Want a hard ceiling on automatic spending? Set a monthly spend cap:

bootload budget set --amount 200

bootload warns you at 80% of the cap and pauses auto top-up once this month's spend reaches it — so a runaway workload can't keep pulling money from your card. bootload budget show displays the cap and spend so far.

Running low, and storage debt

Deploying or scaling up is blocked while a wallet's balance is at or below zero — top up to get moving again.

If a wallet empties while it still holds stored data (volumes or backups), compute is suspended but storage keeps metering, so the balance goes negative: that negative number is what you owe for keeping the data parked. Your saved data is retained for 90 days after the wallet empties; bootload emails a reminder ladder (around days 30, 60, 80, and 88) naming the debt and the deletion date. A top-up settles the debt first, and the remainder becomes spendable — the portal shows the exact split (“€X covers your storage debt · €Y becomes available”) before you pay.

VAT

For business and individual customers alike, top-ups are net + VAT, computed by Stripe Tax against your billing profile:

• Belgian customers pay 21% domestic VAT.
• EU businesses with a valid VAT number get the reverse charge (0% VAT, noted on the invoice).
• EU consumers pay their country's destination rate.
• Customers outside the EU are out of scope (0%).

The ledger always credits the net amount; VAT is collected and remitted by Stripe on top. Set your company details and VAT number on the portal billing settings page; your account profile (bootload profile) carries the same name, address, and VAT identity.

Your ledger

Every movement is recorded. Review recent transactions on the portal wallet page, or export the full ledger as CSV:

bootload usage --csv

Earning credit

Refer someone with your referral link and you earn 5% of their real (topped-up) spend, credited straight to your wallet — they keep 100% of theirs. Referral and affiliate earnings are paid from bootload's margin and show up as credits in your ledger.