Pricing and Costs

Crabbox is open-source software and does not meter or resell compute today. There is no single Crabbox per-minute price: runtime costs remain with your workstation, infrastructure account, or selected provider.

#Current Price Boundary

Crabbox does not currently publish a hosted coordinator plan or a separate Crabbox usage markup. If a provider requires a subscription, credits, or API usage, that agreement remains between the operator and that provider.

crabbox marketplace is preview-only. Configured retail markups affect advisory quotes, but no payment is captured, credits are not reserved, and a quote does not provision a lease.

#What Crabbox Tracks

For coordinator-backed providers, Crabbox records lease counts, active leases, runtime, estimated elapsed cost, and worst-case reserved cost. It can enforce fleet, owner, and organization limits before a new lease is provisioned.

crabbox usage --scope user
crabbox usage --scope org --org example-org

The estimate is an operational guardrail, not invoice reconciliation. Static IP charges, egress, snapshots, taxes, credits, negotiated discounts, and every provider-specific extra are not all modeled.

Direct-from-CLI and delegated-provider spend does not pass through the coordinator, so crabbox usage cannot present it as one consolidated invoice.

#How Rates Are Estimated

Coordinator-backed estimates use this order:

1. An operator-supplied CRABBOX_COST_RATES_JSON override.
2. Live provider pricing where the adapter implements it.
3. A checked-in provider and server-type fallback.
4. A generic final fallback.

Before provisioning, admission rejects a candidate when its reserved-cost estimate for the requested type and TTL would cross a configured limit. This is not a hard provider-invoice ceiling: the final provider or type price can be updated after provisioning, and provider-specific extras are not all included.

See Cost and Usage for rate precedence, environment variables, identity rules, and the exact budget calculation.

#Keep Spend Predictable

• Start with crabbox providers recommend cost-control to favor local runtimes, cleanup, cache reuse, reusable state, and coordinator governance.
• Use one-shot crabbox run to apply the provider's normal post-run release policy; check the provider page when release retains or pauses capacity.
• Give retained boxes an explicit idle timeout and TTL.
• Reuse a warm box or cache when setup time dominates the run.
• Set fleet, per-owner, and per-organization active-lease and monthly limits on the coordinator.
• Verify the selected provider's current rate, quota, architecture, and region before launching expensive or GPU-backed capacity.

#Related Docs

• Cost and Usage
• usage Command
• Infrastructure
• Use Cases