Cloud is postpaid and metered. You are billed for the units you consume, invoiced monthly. There are no plans, no seats and no minimum.
How it works
- Every billable request records the units it consumed, against the project that made it.
- Each service prices each of its operations separately, per unit — the current rates are on each service page, read from the same table that generates the invoice.
- Usage accumulates over the calendar month and is invoiced to the organization’s card at the end of it.
- Only work that produced a result is billed. Failures cost nothing.
Operations within one service are priced independently because they cost independently. Extracting structured data from a page costs several times what fetching that page costs, so they are separate prices, separate meters and separate scopes rather than a flag on one endpoint. That is what stops a caller who wanted the cheap operation from being billed for the expensive one.
Why there is no free tier
Every Cloud request carries real upstream cost the moment it runs, whether or not we can invoice for it. So spending is opt-in and the opt-in is a card: an organization without an active payment method is refused with billing_required at the gateway, before any work happens.
Free usage, when we grant it, is a credit on your account rather than a free allowance written into a product. A credit covers any service you use, including ones that ship after it was granted, and it runs out — which is the honest version of the same offer.
Budget caps
Each project can carry a monthly limit, evaluated before the work, against the calendar month in UTC. It is the control that bounds a runaway loop, and it is the one we recommend setting on day one.
A budget is per project, not per organization. A limit on production does not constrain staging.
When payment fails
If an invoice cannot be collected, the organization moves to past due and the data plane stops serving with billing_past_due until the card is fixed. There is no grace window on a postpaid metered API, and that is deliberate: usage accrued during a retry window would land on the same invoice that is already failing to collect.
Nothing is deleted. Keys, projects and usage history survive; only the ability to spend is paused, and it resumes on the next request once the payment method is valid.
What development costs
There is no separate development tier: the calls you make while integrating are billed at the same per-unit rate as production. In practice that is cents, because only work that produced a result is metered — validation errors, auth failures, rate limits and upstream failures all cost nothing. Set a small monthly budget on a project you are experimenting with and the cap, not the credential, is what bounds the spend. 
