Billing
OwnStack bills for the control plane and the apps it manages. Stacks themselves are billed by your cloud provider — OwnStack never marks up infrastructure.
What OwnStack bills
| Item | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Hosted control plane | The api.ownstack.org service: the API, the deploy worker, the dashboard. Per-account. |
| Per-app fee | A small flat fee per active app, regardless of which stack it deploys to. |
| Add-ons | If you provision OwnStack-side add-ons (logdrain, support, heartbeat), each has its own line. |
Self-hosting the control plane removes the hosted-control-plane line — you pay for the underlying stack instead.
What your cloud provider bills
| Item | Where |
|---|---|
| EC2 / Compute Engine / VPS instance for each stack | AWS / GCP / your provider |
| EBS / persistent disk | Your provider |
| Outbound bandwidth | Your provider |
| Backups (S3 storage) | Your provider, if you configured stack backups to your bucket |
Estimating monthly cost
For a single small Rails app on a shared t3.small:
- EC2
t3.smallon-demand: ~$15/mo - EBS 30 GiB gp3: ~$2.40/mo
- Bandwidth (light): ~$1/mo
- OwnStack control plane + per-app: depends on plan
Reserved instances or savings plans cut the EC2 cost by ~40%.
Invoices
Monthly invoices come from billing.ownstack.org. Failed payment grace is 7 days; after that, deploys are paused (apps keep running). Update card or pay outstanding to resume.