Guide
Billing
Layerbase plans are Free, Solo ($5/mo), and Pro ($15/mo), plus Custom, which is a dedicated server on its own and carries no shared-cloud allowance. This page covers what happens to your money and your databases when you change plans, run the Pro trial, or a renewal payment fails. Your data is never deleted by a billing change: over-limit databases lock, they do not disappear.
Upgrading and downgrading
Switching between Solo and Pro is an in-place change on your existing subscription. It is prorated and charged immediately: you pay (or are credited) the difference for the rest of the current billing period right away, not at your next renewal. The new plan limits and pool take effect at once. Switching while you are still on the Pro trial works differently, and ends the trial: see The Pro free trial below.
Downgrading to a smaller plan never deletes data. If you have more databases than the smaller plan allows, or databases on an engine the smaller plan does not include, those databases are locked rather than removed. Nothing freezes right away: we email you the affected databases and a 72-hour deadline first, and they keep running until it passes. For databases over the new count limit we then pause only as many as it takes to fit, least recently used first, and the email names them in advance. A database on an engine the smaller plan does not include is paused regardless of how active it is. Upgrading to a plan that fits brings paused databases back; freeing a slot instead (deleting an active database) makes a paused one available to activate from its page. See locked databases for the recovery paths.
Canceling a plan
Cancel from your plan page. For paid subscriptions, cancellation is scheduled for the end of the current paid period, not applied instantly: your subscription stays fully active until the period you already paid for runs out, then your account moves to Free-tier limits automatically. You are not charged again after you cancel.
A scheduled cancel is reversible. Click Resume before the period ends and the subscription continues as if you never canceled. Once the period lapses and you drop to Free, any databases over the Free quota lock (they are kept, not deleted), and you cannot create new databases beyond the Free quota until you subscribe again.
The cancel dialog asks one question: why you are leaving. Pick the closest option, or pick "I would rather not say", and add a comment if you want to. An answer is required, but declining is one click and nothing is held back if you do. It is a single screen, there is no retention flow to click through, and the answer goes to us and to our payment provider so we know what to fix.
The dialog also points you at support first, and that offer is genuine. If you are leaving because of a bug, a rough edge, or a feature you needed and could not find, email support@layerbase.com before you cancel. We are a small team and we fix things fast, often the same day. Telling us costs you nothing and you can still cancel afterwards.
Canceling at the period end is the only way to end a paid plan from your plan page, on purpose. There used to be an End plan now button that ended the plan immediately and forfeited the time you had already paid for, with no proration or refund. It gave you nothing that canceling does not, since billing stops either way, so we removed it. Your data, settings, and domains are kept either way. If you need your plan features cut off today rather than at the period end, email support@layerbase.com and we will do it for you.
The Pro free trial
Pro ships with a 7-day free trial so you can use Performance engines and the always-on pool before paying. A card is required at checkout, you are charged $0 up front, and the trial auto-converts to $15/mo on day 7. Cancel any time during the trial from your plan page and you are never charged. Cancellation ends the trial and Pro access immediately; your account moves to Free, and unused trial days are forfeited. This also applies when you cancel through the billing portal.
The trial is one per customer. It is matched by your normalized email and card fingerprint, so a second account or a re-checkout on the same card does not get another free week. If you are not eligible, checkout uses the "Start now, no trial" path and charges the plan price immediately.
You can switch plans during the trial, but it is not the in-place change described above. Switching ends the trial straight away: we cancel the trial subscription and send you to checkout for the plan you picked, charged at its normal price today. There is no second free trial on the new plan, and unused days on the old one are not carried over. The confirm dialog on your plan page says the same thing before you commit.
Add-ons like pool blocks and extra team seats are locked while you are trialing, until the subscription is active. To unlock them early, use End trial & start now on your plan page: it converts the trial to an active subscription on the plan you are already on and charges the base price on the spot. Otherwise everything unlocks automatically when the trial converts on day 7.
When a payment fails
If a renewal charge is declined, your subscription goes past-due and the payment provider auto-retries the card over the next several days. If every retry fails, the subscription is marked unpaid. Both states suspend your account across every cloud server within seconds.
While suspended, new database creates and other account changes are blocked. Your existing databases keep running and stay reachable, so a failed card does not take your apps offline. You will get a past-due email with a link to the billing portal where you can update your card.
Recovery is automatic. Once a payment succeeds, the suspension is cleared for you (either the moment the provider confirms the charge, or by the daily billing reconcile as a backstop), and creates work again. You do not need to contact support to lift a past-due suspension. Canceling on purpose never suspends your account: it just drops you to Free at the end of the period.
Bandwidth and acceptable use
Unmetered means you're never charged for usage - every plan is a flat monthly price. To keep shared regions fast for everyone, non-dedicated plans are subject to an Acceptable Use Policy on sustained bandwidth. Properly configured applications won't come near it; it exists to catch runaway clients, not real workloads. On a Dedicated server the policy doesn't apply - the hardware is yours.
The allowance is measured per 24 hours, per 7 days, and per 30 days, as total transfer in and out summed across every database on your account. Free is 10 GB / 50 GB / 150 GB, Solo is 25 GB / 125 GB / 375 GB, and Pro is 100 GB / 500 GB / 1500 GB. A dedicated server has no cap.
Going over never generates a charge. You get a 24-hour grace period with a warning email and a dashboard banner; if usage comes back under the allowance in that window, nothing else happens. If it does not, or if usage is more than 5x the allowance (which skips the grace period entirely), your databases are stopped and cannot be restarted until you upgrade or the traffic is fixed. Stopping is not deletion: your data and backups are untouched.
Always-on is a paid feature. A Free database is expected to be asleep at least 25% of any rolling 7-day window (about 6 hours a day). Pollers, uptime monitors, keep-alive pings, and deployed apps that keep a Free database awake around the clock violate the policy: the database is put to sleep and paused there, and repeat offenders may be frozen. Nothing is deleted, and Export still works on a paused database, though it takes several minutes because the engine has to run briefly to make the dump, and is limited to 5 exports per database every 24 hours. Upgrading lifts the pause, and turning on Settings > Availability > Always on keeps it running all the time.
The Free plan itself is scoped to development, testing, evaluation, CI, personal projects, and early-stage products; once a product runs in production and earns recurring revenue it belongs on a paid plan, which we ask for by email rather than by stopping anything (What the Free plan is for).
The overwhelming majority of AUP violations are unintentional - most often a Redis or Valkey client in a tight poll loop re-reading the entire keyspace many times per second, or clients that open connections without closing them. Fixing these typically cuts traffic by 99% or more and improves your application's latency. The full policy, including how re-registration is handled, is on the Acceptable Use Policy page.
Pool blocks and dedicated servers
Pool blocks are the one add-on: $10/mo each on Pro, adding 1 GB always-on RAM, 1 vCPU, and 25 GB storage per block. They stack, are removable any time, and are prorated: adding or removing one charges or credits the difference immediately, the same way a plan swap does.
Dedicated (Custom) servers bill and cancel differently from Solo and Pro. Unless you are inside a prepaid term (see below), a dedicated cancel is immediate and irreversible with no proration or refund, so it has its own page: dedicated servers.
Prepaying a dedicated server
If you run a dedicated server in the United States, you can pay for several months of it up front at a discount instead of month by month. The standing offer is 12 months for the price of 10, so two months are free. Servers in other locations bill monthly and cannot be prepaid. Shorter terms and deeper discounts appear on your plan page whenever a promotion is running; that page always shows the terms and prices you can actually buy today.
The term starts at your next renewal. The month you are in has already been billed, so a prepayment covers the renewals that follow rather than the one you just paid for.
Prepaying is not a separate annual subscription. You keep the same monthly subscription you already have, and the prepayment is applied to it as a credit worth one month of your server, every month, for the length of the term. Your server, your databases, and your connection strings are untouched. Only the dedicated part of your bill is covered: if you also pay for Solo or Pro, that part keeps billing normally.
One thing worth knowing up front: while a prepaid term is covering your whole bill, the billing portal shows your subscription as Free. That is the wording our payment provider uses for any subscription that currently charges $0, and it is the prepaid credit doing its job. You have not been moved to the Free plan and nothing about your account has changed. Your plan page shows the real amount of your next charge while a term is running, so the figure there is what your card will actually be billed.
The amount of prepaid credit you have left is shown in the sidebar of your cloud dashboard. It is based on what you paid, not on the list price of the months it buys: a 12-month term on the 4GB server bought at the standing price of $350 starts at $350 and ticks down by about $29.17 at each renewal, so the number never claims more than the money you actually handed us. Bought under the launch promotion instead (through September 30, 2026, $210 for that same term), it starts at $210 and ticks down by $17.50.
Canceling during a prepaid term works differently from a normal dedicated cancel. You keep the server for every month you have paid for: the cancellation is scheduled and takes effect when the term ends, rather than tearing the box down immediately. For the same reason, plan switches, an immediate end-of-plan, and deleting your account are blocked while a term is running, since each would remove the server you prepaid. When the term finishes, billing simply resumes at your normal monthly server price, and we email you about two weeks beforehand so the date is never a surprise. If you need something changed mid term, email support and we will sort it out by hand.
Prepayments are non-refundable. Scheduling a cancellation stops the renewal that would have followed the term, but it does not return the months you paid for and did not use. You can ask support for a refund and we may grant one at our discretion. When we do, we work it out at the full monthly rate: every month the term has already covered is counted at the standard monthly price for that server, as if you had been paying month to month, and only what is left over comes back. On the standing 12-month term for the 4GB server ($350), three covered months are counted at $35 each, so at most $245 remains. A term bought at the launch price has less room in it: on the $210 12-month term, four covered months at $35 each leave $70, and from the sixth covered month on there is nothing left to return.