Plan tiers

How your plan tier is resolved and how it affects quotas, instance types, and machine lifecycle

Your plan tier determines your resource limits, available instance types, and machine lifecycle rules. Akua resolves your effective tier through a specific chain, and understanding this helps you predict what happens when you upgrade, downgrade, or work across multiple workspaces.

Tier resolution

Workspace tier

Each workspace has its own plan:

• No active subscription → Free tier
• Pro plan active → Pro tier (set automatically when you subscribe)

The workspace tier controls quota limits, instance type filtering, and machine TTL.

User tier

Some operations use a user-level tier such as rate limit naming and quota info display. Your user tier is the highest tier across all your workspaces:

• You belong to 3 workspaces: 2 Free + 1 Pro → your user tier is Pro
• You belong to 2 workspaces: both Free → your user tier is Free

Upgrading one workspace to Pro also elevates your personal rate limits.

What each tier controls

Instance type filtering

When your cluster scales, the available instance types depend on the workspace tier:

Tier	Available instance types
Free	Small, affordable types only
Pro	All types from the provider
BYOM (any tier)	All types in your cloud account

Quota enforcement

Quotas are enforced at the moment a machine record is created, preventing concurrent requests from exceeding the limit.

Metric	Free limit	Pro limit	BYOM
Machines	1	3	Unlimited
CPU cores	2	8	Unlimited
Memory	4 GiB	16 GiB	Unlimited
Clusters	1	3	N/A

Free-tier workspaces are also subject to a per-user check to prevent circumventing limits by creating multiple free workspaces. Pro workspaces skip this check.

Machine TTL

Tier	TTL	What happens
Free (Akua-managed)	7 days	Auto-deleted with email reminders at 5d, 2d, and 24h
Pro (Akua-managed)	No limit	Runs until manually deleted or suspended
BYOM (any tier)	No limit	You pay the provider directly

Auto-scaling behavior

Tier	Auto-scaling
Free	Enabled within quota (1 machine max)
Pro	Enabled within quota (3 machines max)
Downgraded (was Pro)	Paused automatically when subscription ends

When tiers change

Upgrade (Free to Pro)

Takes effect immediately:

1. All provider instance types become available (not just small types).
2. Quotas increase (1 → 3 machines, 2 → 8 CPU cores, and so on).
3. Machine TTL is removed; existing machines no longer expire.
4. Auto-scaling limits expand.

Downgrade (Pro to Free)

Takes effect at the end of the billing period:

1. Akua-managed machines are suspended (not deleted).
2. Auto-scaling is paused on managed clusters.
3. Quotas revert to free limits.
4. Instance type filtering returns to small types only.
5. BYOM machines are unaffected.

BYOM (any tier)

Adding your own cloud API key bypasses all quota enforcement:

• No machine count limit.
• No CPU or memory limit.
• No TTL.
• All instance types available in your cloud account.
• No auto-scaling restrictions.

The only Akua charge is the management subscription. Cloud compute costs go directly to your provider.

Related topics

Billing overview

Upgrade, manage, and cancel your subscription.

Plans and pricing

Full plan comparison with included limits.

Quotas

How resource quotas are enforced across workspaces.

Add workers

Connect your own cloud machines to bypass compute limits.