Most infrastructure SaaS prices on whatever scales most unpredictably for the customer:
- Datadog: per host and per metric and per log
- Splunk: per gigabyte ingested
- Sentry: per event
- Auth0: per active user
- Most observability tools: a thicket of unit-economics that guarantee your bill goes up faster than your business does
We took the boring path. Vloud is per host.
The unit
A “host” is a Linux server running the Vloud engine. The engine runs on it; the license file lives on it; the work the engine does scales with the apps you run on that host, not with arbitrary metric counts.
Whether you have one app or twenty on the same box, your bill stays the same. Whether you ingest 10 GB of logs per day or 100, your bill stays the same. Whether you have one engineer using the panel or twenty, your bill stays the same.
What we don’t charge for
- Seats. Add as many engineers as you want.
- Metrics. Internal Prometheus stays internal; expose it to whatever monitoring you already pay for (or don’t).
- Events. The audit log is unbounded.
- API calls. The console makes them; we don’t count.
- Uploads. Storage is your S3 / Wasabi / local disk. We don’t intermediate.
- AI Doctor queries. Bring your own model, your own quota.
What we do charge for
A flat per-host fee, scaled by tier:
- Free — 1 host, limited features, for trying it out
- Pro — up to 3 hosts, all features
- Business — up to 10 hosts, advanced features, priority support
- Enterprise — custom, air-gap, dedicated success
That’s the whole pricing page. No metric meters, no seat math, no “contact us” hidden tier for normal customers.
Why we don’t charge “for usage”
Per-usage pricing has two effects:
- The vendor’s incentive aligns with making your bill go up
- The customer can’t budget — peak usage spikes the bill exactly when they’d like it not to
Both effects make the relationship adversarial. We’d rather charge predictably and bet on the customer renewing because the product works, not because the contract makes leaving expensive.
The honest tradeoff
If your usage profile is one host doing the work of fifty, we lose money. If your usage profile is fifty light hosts, we’re cheaper than you’d expect. We’re betting on the average.
So far that’s worked. Pricing is a values document. Per-host pricing says we trust customers to scale honestly with us, and we won’t trap them in a contract whose meter ticks faster than their business. That’s a fair deal. We’ll keep making it.