Skip to content

Billing & Invoices

This page explains how Servala bills your services so you can read your invoice and understand how each amount came to be. It describes the structure of the bill, not the actual prices. For a price indication, use the calculator on servala.com. For the exact price, configure a service in the Servala Portal.

Where prices come from

The calculator on servala.com gives you a price indication: a quick estimate of the monthly price for a given size, provider, and service level. The Servala Portal is the source of truth. When you configure a service there, it shows the exact price, including the breakdown per line item, so you can see what makes up the total before you create the instance. The invoice you receive later uses the same model and the same line items.

The idea in one line

Servala bills every service instance as a set of independent components. Each component is priced on its own, and the sum is your monthly total. This is why an invoice has several lines per service instead of a single lump sum: each line is one part of the price, and together they explain how the total came to be.

What you are billed for

A service instance is billed through the following components. Each one becomes one or more lines on your invoice.

Component What it covers
Compute The CPU and RAM your instance runs on, selected as a compute plan
Storage Persistent storage for your data, backups included
Additional resources Provider extras a service may need, such as a load balancer or a public IP address
Managed Service The flat cost of operating the service: monitoring, maintenance, updates, and incident response
Managed Service Sizing A size-based operating cost that grows as your instance gets larger
License A commercial software license, only where the software vendor requires one

Your monthly total is simply the sum of these:

Total = Compute
      + Storage
      + Additional resources (where applicable)
      + Managed Service
      + Managed Service Sizing
      + License (where applicable)

The rest of this page explains each line so you can match it against your bill.

Compute

You choose a compute plan when you provision a service. A plan is a fixed bundle of CPU and RAM (for example a plan with 8 GiB RAM). The plan name means the same resources on every cloud provider, but the price differs by provider because it reflects each provider's infrastructure cost. See Compute Plans & SLAs for how to choose one.

Compute appears as one line per component. If you run more than one replica of a component for higher availability, the compute line is multiplied by the replica count.

Storage

Storage is billed per GiB and shown as its own line. The rate already includes the cost of backups, so there is no separate backup line. A provider may offer several storage classes (for example SSD or NVMe), each with its own per-GiB rate. Each persistent volume of your instance is its own storage line, labelled by the component it belongs to, and it is multiplied by that component's replica count.

Additional resources

Some service and provider combinations need infrastructure beyond compute and storage, such as load balancers, public or floating IP addresses, DNS records, or network traffic. Where they apply, these appear as separate lines at the provider's rate. They are flat per instance: they do not grow with replicas or storage size. The same service on a different provider may need none of them.

Managed Service

A flat monthly fee per instance, independent of size. It covers the baseline cost of operating a managed service: monitoring, maintenance, updates, and incident response. The fee depends on the service and on the service level you choose.

Managed Service Sizing

A size-based fee that reflects the extra effort of operating a larger instance: larger backups, longer recovery times, more involved tuning. Today this is measured per GiB of RAM in your main component's compute plan (a plan with 8 GiB RAM counts as 8 units).

This fee uses a volume discount, so the per-unit cost falls as your instance grows, and it appears as one line per discount range.

How services with several parts are billed

A service can be made of a main component and one or more supporting components. For example, a Nextcloud instance runs alongside its own PostgreSQL database. Each component has its own compute and storage, with its own plan and replica count, and each appears on your invoice.

The Managed Service and Managed Service Sizing fees are charged once for the whole instance, based on the main component. Supporting components do not add their own managed service fee. So a composite service shows several compute and storage lines but only one set of managed service lines.

Service levels (SLA)

A service level is an optional uptime guarantee. Without one, a service runs on a reasonable-effort basis with no uptime commitment.

When you select a service level, its surcharge is folded into the Managed Service fee and the sizing fee rather than appearing as a separate line. The invoice therefore looks the same whether or not you chose a service level: the managed service amounts are simply higher. The surcharge differs per service, because guaranteeing uptime takes different effort for different services.

Some service levels require high availability. In that case the portal enforces a minimum number of replicas, and your instance is billed for the replicas it runs.

How the volume discount works

The sizing fee uses a progressive model that works like income-tax brackets. The units of your instance (for example GiB of RAM) are split into successive ranges, and each range has its own per-unit rate. Higher ranges get a larger discount, so the per-unit cost goes down as your instance grows.

Each range is a separate line on the invoice, which is why a larger instance can show several sizing lines. The discount applies only to the sizing fee: compute and storage are not affected. If you selected a service level, its surcharge is added before the discount, so it is discounted at the same rate.

How size and replicas change the bill

When you resize an instance or change its replica count, the components react differently:

Component What happens when you scale
Compute Each component is multiplied by its own replica count
Storage Each volume is multiplied by its component's replica count
Managed Service Flat: always counted once
Managed Service Sizing Calculated from the plan size, then multiplied by the main component's replica count

The discount range is determined by the size of a single plan, not by the total across all replicas. The split is calculated once from the plan and then multiplied by the replica count.

Reading your invoice

Putting it together, a single service instance on your invoice typically shows:

  • one or more compute lines (one per component, times its replicas),
  • one or more storage lines (one per volume, times its replicas),
  • any additional resource lines the service needs on that provider,
  • one Managed Service line,
  • one or more Managed Service Sizing lines (one per discount range),
  • and a License line where the software requires one.

Lines are grouped per service instance, so when you run several services you can see at a glance which lines belong to which instance.

Your invoice is issued to the billing entity associated with your organization. See Organizations for how organizations and billing entities relate.

Marketplace customers

If your organization was created through a cloud provider marketplace, your Servala usage may be billed by that provider instead of directly by Servala. For example, Exoscale Marketplace customers see Servala usage on their Exoscale invoice as a single amount per service, billed by Exoscale. The component breakdown described here still determines that amount.