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.
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. You choose which stay active up to the new limit, and the rest freeze until you upgrade again or free up a slot. See locked databases for the recovery paths.
Canceling a plan
Cancel from your plan page. 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 and add a comment if you want to. 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.
You can also End plan now instead of canceling at the period end. That takes effect immediately and forfeits the time you already paid for, with no proration or refund, so use it only if you want the plan features gone right away. Your data, settings, and domains are kept either way. During a prepaid dedicated term, ending now is blocked so you cannot forfeit months you have already paid for.
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.
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.
Two things are restricted while you are trialing. You cannot switch plans (a Solo/Pro swap during a trial would consume the trial and leave you on the wrong plan), and add-ons like pool blocks and extra team seats are locked 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 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.
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, 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. 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.
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 bought for $210 starts at $210 and ticks down by $17.50 at each renewal, so the number never claims more than the money you actually handed us.
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.