How Virtual Machines are billed on the Raff Platform — full per-plan rate tables for Standard and Premium tiers, subscription vs PAYG, billing-date alignment, and what’s billed alongside the plan
Two plan tiers, each with multiple sizes. Prices are USD, per VM, per region.
Tier
CPU model
Use case
Standard — General Purpose
Shared vCPU
Web servers, dev/staging, batch jobs, anything that doesn’t need consistent CPU performance every millisecond. Best price/CPU
Premium — CPU Optimized
Dedicated vCPU
Databases, real-time services, latency-sensitive APIs, anything where noisy-neighbor variability would hurt. Higher per-vCPU price, predictable performance
Pick Standard for cost-efficient general-purpose workloads where short performance dips don’t matter. Pick Premium when consistent, dedicated CPU is the goal.
Yearly and 24-month are the same per-month rate — both equivalent to paying for 10 months instead of 12 (≈17% off the monthly rate). The lock isn’t a deeper discount; it’s a flat 10-of-12 / 20-of-24 cost reduction with the trade-off that you commit the term up front.
Term
Cost equivalent
Discount vs monthly
Monthly
full rate
—
Yearly
10 of 12 months
~17%
24-month
20 of 24 months
~17%
Pick yearly or 24-month if you’re confident about a workload’s lifespan; pick monthly if you want maximum flexibility — delete prorates unused time back to your balance regardless of term.The data above reflects published rates. The same list is queryable at runtime via List VM Pricing — use the plan id as pricing_id when creating a VM through the API.
You pay for the term you pick (e.g. monthly) up front from your account balance. The full subscription cost is reserved at creation, and the VM runs without any further charges until the term ends or you change something.When you delete a VM, downsize via resize, or otherwise reduce the subscription, the unused days and hours are credited back to your account balance. The credit is immediate and can be used to top up other resources or another VM.Stopping a VM (passive state) does not prorate or pause billing — the subscription continues for the term you paid for.
Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) bills usage by the hour from your balance, with no advance commitment. The hourly rate matches the per-hour cost of the equivalent subscription plan.PAYG is available for enterprise and SMB customers on request — contact support to enable it on your account. The default for new accounts is subscription.
Raff automatically normalizes every account’s billing to the 1st of the month, so that no matter when you create VMs, you eventually receive one consolidated invoice on the 1st instead of a separate invoice for every create date.This happens by default — no setting to toggle.
You pay the full subscription term from your create date forward (e.g. create on the 14th → pay for one month, ending on the 14th of the next month).
Month 2 — normalization
At the next renewal, Raff issues a prorated charge that covers the gap between your renewal date and the upcoming 1st. From there, your billing date is locked to the 1st.
Month 3 onward — aligned
Every renewal lands on the 1st of the month. Every VM, volume, snapshot, backup, and Public IP on the same account renews together.
The prorated charge in month 2 is always smaller than a full month — it covers only the leftover days between the old renewal date and the 1st. After that single correction, your invoices are 1-to-1 with calendar months.
All three VMs renew together for the full month — one invoice
From July 1 forward, every VM on this account renews on the 1st. Every invoice has clear per-resource line items — VMs are billed together but never merged into a lump sum.
One invoice per month — easier reconciliation, easier expense reports, easier monthly budgeting.
Predictable cash flow — you know exactly when the next bill lands.
Clean separation — every resource is its own line item with its own price and term, so you can still see what each VM costs.
Smaller mid-flight charges — the only “extra” event is one prorated charge per resource, always less than a full month.
PAYG accounts (enterprise / SMB on request) follow a different cycle — usage accrues hourly and is settled at month-end on the 1st without the prorated normalization step.
