Once you enter a credit card and an email address and both are verified, you will receive a small amount of free test credit. Then you can increase your credit balance using one-time payments with the add credit button. Whenever your credit balance hits zero or below, your instances will be stopped automatically, but not destroyed.

You are still charged storage costs for stopped instances, so it is important to destroy instances when you are done using them.

Your credit card will be automatically charged periodically to pay off any outstanding negative balance.

Update Frequency #

Balances are updated about once every few seconds.

Auto Debit #

You can set a balance threshold to configure auto debits, which will attempt to maintain your balance above the threshold by charging your card periodically. We recommend setting a threshold around your daily or weekly spend, and then setting an balance email notification threshold around 75% of that value, so that you get notified if the auto billing fails but long before your balance depletes to zero.

There is also an optional debit-mode feature which can be enabled by request for older accounts. When debit-mode is enabled, your account balance is allowed to go negative (without immediately stopping your instances).

Your card is charged automatically regardless of whether or not you have debit-mode enabled. Instances are never free - even stopped instances have storage charges. Make sure you delete instances when you are done with them - otherwise, your card will continue to be periodically charged indefinitely.

Credit Card Security #

You don't need to: Vast.ai does not see, store or process your credit card numbers, they are passed directly to Stripe (which you can verify in the javascript).

Pricing #

There are separate prices and charges for:

• Base active rental costs
• Storage costs
• Bandwidth costs

You are charged the base active rental cost for every second your instance is in the active/connected state. You are charged the storage cost (which depends on the size of your storage allocation) for every single second your instance exists, regardless of what state it is in: whether it is active or inactive, online or offline, functional or broken. Stopping an instance does not avoid storage costs.

You are charged bandwidth prices for every byte sent or received to or from the instance, regardless of what state it is in. The prices for base rental, storage, and bandwidth vary considerably from machine to machine, so make sure to check them.

Payment Integrations #

We currently support major credit cards through stripe and crypto payments through Coinbase and crypto.com.