Credits: what a Public college account gets free, and what uses them
A free account in the Public college is given 100 credits every month, enough to follow most lessons. A credit is a fifth of a cent, 500 to the dollar. They pay for the things that keep a machine busy for you: a VM, a container lab, an app you have deployed and the build that starts it. Free credits that are not used do not carry over to the next month.
Credits are for the Public college. A college that has bought the platform has its own price, on the pricing page, and its students are not charged credits.
What a credit pays for
A virtual machine: 20 credits for each hour it runs.
A container lab, and a terminal or database in a session: 10 credits for each hour it runs.
A deployed app: 10 credits for each hour it runs, and 10 credits each time you start a deployment, because the build is the scarce part.
Running code in the editor is free. Time is counted by the minute, and anything that runs for part of a minute is counted as the whole minute.
Seeing what you have used
Your VMs page and your Deployments page show the credits used this month, how many of the free ones are left and the day they come back, the first of the next month in UTC.
For now credits are counted and shown, and nothing is stopped for running out of them: you can go past the free credits and carry on. The daily limits on each kind of machine still apply.
Top-ups and refunds
Top-ups from $5 will be available, at the same rate as the free credits are worth: a fifth of a cent a credit, with no bonus tiers. Credits you buy stay valid for at least 12 months.
Credits you bought and have not used can be refunded, less the payment processor’s transaction cost. Credits you have used, and the free ones, cannot be refunded.
What is kept about it
Each VM, container and deployment you run is recorded against your account with the minutes it ran and the credits that came to, so the month can be added up. It is kept for the life of the account and deleted with it.
Questions people ask
- Do I need credits to run code?
- No. Running code in the editor is free and is limited by how fast you press Run, not by credits.
- What happens when I run out of free credits?
- Nothing yet: credits are counted and shown, and nothing is stopped. The daily limits on VMs and apps still apply.