Tiers & Pricing¶
Tiers¶
Gigalixir offers 2 tiers of pricing. The free tier is free, but you are limited to 1 instance up to size 0.5 and 1 free tier database. Also, on the free tier, if you haven’t deployed anything for over 30 days, we will send you an email to remind you to keep your account active. If you do not, your app may be scaled down to 0 replicas. We know this isn’t ideal, but we think it is better than sleeping instances and we appreciate your understanding since the free tier does cost a lot to run.
| Instance Feature | FREE Tier | STANDARD Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Zero-downtime deploys | YES | YES |
| Websockets | YES | YES |
| Automatic TLS | YES | YES |
| Log Aggregation | YES | YES |
| Log Tailing | YES | YES |
| Hot Upgrades | YES | YES |
| Remote Observer | YES | YES |
| No Connection Limits | YES | YES |
| No Daily Restarts | YES | YES |
| Custom Domains | YES | YES |
| Postgres-as-a-Service | YES | YES |
| SSH Access | YES | YES |
| Vertical Scaling | YES | |
| Horizontal Scaling | YES | |
| Clustering | YES | |
| Multiple Apps | YES | |
| Team Permissions | YES | |
| No Inactivity Checks | YES |
| Database Feature | FREE Tier | STANDARD Tier |
|---|---|---|
| SSL Connections | YES | YES |
| Data Import/Export | YES | YES |
| Data Encryption | YES | |
| Dedicated CPU | YES* | |
| Dedicated Memory | YES | |
| Dedicated Disk | YES | |
| No Connection Limits | YES* | |
| No Row Limits | YES | |
| Backups | YES | |
| Scalable/Upgradeable | YES | |
| Automatic Data Migration | YES | |
| Extensions | YES | |
| Functions | YES | |
| Triggers | YES | |
| Role Management | YES |
- Only size 4 and above have dedicated CPU. See Database Sizes & Pricing.
- Databases still have connection limits based on Google Cloud SQL limits. See https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/quotas#fixed-limits
Gigalixir vs Heroku Feature Comparison¶
| Feature | Gigalixir FREE Tier | Gigalixir STANDARD Tier | Heroku Free | Heroku Standard | Heroku Performance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Websockets | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Log Aggregation | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Log Tailing | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Custom Domains | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Postgres-as-a-Service | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| No sleeping | YES | YES | YES | YES | |
| Automatic TLS | YES | YES | YES | YES | |
| Preboot | YES | YES | YES | YES | |
| Zero-downtime deploys | YES | YES | |||
| SSH Access | YES | YES | |||
| Hot Upgrades | YES | YES | |||
| Remote Observer | YES | YES | |||
| No Connection Limits | YES | YES | |||
| No Daily Restarts | YES | YES | |||
| Flexible Instance Sizes | YES | ||||
| Clustering | YES | ||||
| Horizontal Scaling | YES | YES | YES | ||
| Built-in Metrics | YES | YES | |||
| Threshold Alerts | YES | YES | |||
| Dedicated Instances | YES | ||||
| Autoscaling | YES |
Pricing Details¶
In the free tier, everything is no-credit-card free. Once you upgrade to the standard tier, you pay $10 for every 200MB of memory per month ($0.05/MB/Month/Replica). CPU, bandwidth, and power are free.
See our cost estimator to calculate how much you should expect to pay each month. Keep reading for exactly how we compute your bill.
Every month after you sign up on the same day of the month, we calculate the number of replica-size-seconds used and charge your credit card.
replica-size-seconds is how many replicas you ran multiplied by the size of each replica multiplied by how many seconds they were run. This is aggregated across all your apps and is prorated to the second.
For example, if you ran a single replica of size 0.5 (500 MB) for the entire month, your bill will be
(1 replica) * (500 MB) * (1 month) * (0.05 $/MB-Month-Replica) = $25.00
If you ran a single replica of size 1.0 (1000 MB) for 10 days, then scaled it up to 3 replicas, then 10 days later scaled the size up to 2.0 and it was a 30-day month, then your bill would be
[ (1 replica) * (1000 MB) * (1/3 month)
+ (3 replicas) * (1000 MB) * (1/3 month)
+ (3 replicas) * (2000 MB) * (1/3 month) ]
* (0.05 $/MB-Month-Replica) = $166.67
For database pricing, see Database Sizes & Pricing.
Database Sizes & Pricing¶
In the free tier, the database is free, but it is really not suitable for production use. It is a multi-tenant postgres database cluster with shared CPU, memory, and disk. You are limited to 2 connections, 10,000 rows, and no backups. Idle connections are terminated after 5 minutes. If you want to upgrade your database, you’ll have to migrate the data yourself. For a complete feature comparison see Tiers.
In the standard tier, database sizes are defined as a single number for simplicity. The number defines how many GBs of memory your database will have. Supported sizes include 0.6, 1.7, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, 64, and 128. Sizes 0.6 and 1.7 share CPU with other databases. All other sizes have dedicated CPU, 1 CPU for every 4 GB of memory. For example, size 4 has 1 dedicated CPU and size 64 has 16 dedicated CPUs. All databases start with 10 GB disk and increase automatically as needed.
| Size | Price / Month | RAM | Rollback Days | Connection Limit | Storage Limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.6 | $25 | 0.6 GB | 7 | 25 | 25 GB |
| 1.7 | $50 | 1.7 GB | 7 | 50 | 50 GB |
| 4 | $100 | 4 GB | 7 | 100 | 100 GB |
| 8 | $200 | 8 GB | 7 | 200 | 200 GB |
| 16 | $400 | 16 GB | 7 | 250 | 400 GB |
| 32 | $800 | 32 GB | 7 | 300 | 800 GB |
| 48 | $1200 | 48 GB | 7 | 350 | 1.2 TB |
| 64 | $1600 | 64 GB | 7 | 400 | 1.6 TB |
| 128 | $3200 | 128 GB | 7 | 500 | 3.2 TB |
Prices are prorated to the second.
For more, see How to provision a Standard PostgreSQL database and How to provision a Free PostgreSQL database.
Replica Sizing¶
- A replica is a docker container that your app runs in.
- Replica sizes are available in increments of 0.1 between 0.2 and 384, but for the higher sizes you’ll need to contact us first.
- 1 size unit is 1GB memory, 1 CPU share, and 564mbps egress bandwidth.
- 1 CPU share is 200m as defined using Kubernetes CPU requests or roughly 20% of a core guaranteed.
- If you are on a machine with other containers that don’t use much CPU, you can use as much CPU as you like.
- Memory is defined using Kuberenetes memory requests.
- If you are on a machine with other machines that don’t use much memory, you can use as much memory as you like.
- Memory and CPU sizes can not be adjusted separately.
Why was my app scaled down to 0?¶
On the free tier apps are scaled down to 0 if there have been no deploys for 30 days. We send a warning email after 23 days. To prevent this from happening, make sure you either deploy often or upgrade to the standard tier.
Custom Domain Pricing¶
Gigalixir allows custom domains for each application. Up to 100 custom domains are included free for each application. Additional custom domains can be purchased by contacting us.
Limits¶
Gigalixir is designed for Elixir/Phoenix apps and it is common for Elixir/Phoenix apps to have many connections open at a time and to have connections open for long periods of time. Because of this, we do not limit the number of concurrent connections or the duration of each connection[1][2].
We also know that Elixir/Phoenix apps are designed to be long-lived and potentially store state in-memory so we do not restart replicas arbitrarily. In fact, replicas should not restart at all, unless there is an extenuating circumstance that requires it. For apps that require extreme high availability, we suggest that your app be able to handle node restarts just as you would for any app not running on Gigalixir.
That said, we do have a number of limits in order to prevent abuse which are listed below. If you need to request a higher limit, contact us and we’ll do our best to accomodate you.
| Resource | Limit |
|---|---|
| Log Drains | 5 |
| Apps | 100 |
| SSH Keys | 50 |
| Collaborators | 25 |
| Config Vars | 32kb |
| Slug Size | 500mb |
| Repo Size | 1gb |
| Build Time | 30m |
| Disk | 10gb |
| Bandwidth | 1tb/mo |
[1] Because Gigalixir runs on Google Compute Engine, you may bump into an issue with connections that stay idle for 10m. For more information and how to work around it, see https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/troubleshooting [2] We do have a timeout of 60 minutes for connections after an nginx configuration reload. If you have a long-lived websocket connection and our nginx configuration is reloaded, the connection will be dropped 60 minutes later. Unfortunately, nginx reloads happen frequently under Kubernetes.