Spend and caps

How billing accrues

• Compute accrues per vCPU-hour, only while the sandbox is running, prorated to the second with no minimum. A 4 vCPU sandbox running for one hour uses 4 vCPU-hours. Every other status, including stopped, costs $0 compute.
• Storage is free for the first 48 hours of every sandbox, forks included. After that it accrues per GB-month until the sandbox is deleted, stopped or not. A month is a fixed 730 hours, and a GB is 10^9 bytes. Storage is metered on the sandbox’s provisioned disk size (50 GB for small), not on the bytes used.
• AI calls through the host proxy are priced at the provider’s list price and reported. You pay your provider; Zode adds nothing. See Agents.

Included usage and credit

• With a card, nothing stops. Sandboxes keep running, and usage past what is included goes on that month’s invoice.
• Without a card, once remaining credit is $0 or less, creating, forking and starting sandboxes fail with HTTP 402 credit_exhausted, and running sandboxes are stopped (hibernated, never deleted) within about 15 minutes. Add a card or buy credit in Billing to lift the block, then start them again. Enterprise is exempt.

Low-balance events

{
  "reason": "No credit left and no payment method on file: 2 running sandbox(es) stopped, none deleted. Add a card or buy credit in Billing to start them again.",
  "balance_micros": 0,
  "threshold_micros": 2000000,
  "exhausted": true,
  "sandboxes_stopped": ["sbx_q3vfn7tkx2mhcw4a", "sbx_r7k2wbn6tdyx3lpe"]
}

Cap a sandbox

import { Sandbox } from "@zodedev/sdk";

const sb = await Sandbox.create({ maxCostMicros: 2_000_000 }); // $2

curl -s https://api.zode.dev/v1/sandboxes \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ZODE_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"vcpus": 2, "max_cost_micros": 2000000}'

zode new --max-cost 2

Cap the workspace

curl -s -X PATCH https://api.zode.dev/v1/billing \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ZODE_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"daily_cap_micros": 5000000, "sandbox_default_cap_micros": 1000000}'

• sandbox_default_cap_micros becomes the max_cost_micros of every new sandbox that names none.
• daily_cap_micros applies per UTC day, in two places:
  • Once today’s billed spend (compute and storage) reaches it, creating, forking and starting sandboxes answer 409 daily_cap_reached: “today’s spend $X has reached the workspace's daily cap$Y; raise it in Billing or wait for 00:00 UTC”. Running sandboxes are not stopped.
  • Once today’s AI spend through Zode keys reaches it, the host refuses AI calls with HTTP 402 zode_spend_cap until 00:00 UTC, and sends spend.daily_cap_reached.

Read usage

$ zode cost
2026-11-05 to 2026-11-11 UTC, as of 2026-11-11 11:04

billed      $0.005875   compute $0.003179   storage $0.002696
AI          $0.000000 in 0 calls, shown, not billed
sandboxes   0.182 h, peak 2 at once, 6 forks (p95 17876 ms)
events      0 OOM kills, 0 breaker trips

REPO     BILLED      AI          HOURS
(none)   $0.005875   $0.000000   0.182

• GET /v1/usage?from=YYYY-MM-DD&to=YYYY-MM-DD&group_by=branch: UTC days, inclusive, at most 92 (default the last 30). Returns totals, a series entry per day, groups (most expensive first) and ai_by_model.
• GET /v1/usage.csv with the same parameters: columns day, <group_by>, sandbox_hours, compute_micros, storage_micros, static_ip_micros, billable_micros, ai_micros_not_billed, ai_calls.