Billing & Limits

Box bills machine time by the second, only while a box is running.

$1 buys 100,000 seconds of machine time, about 27 hours. That is $0.036 per hour, or about $26 for a default box running 24/7 for a month.
Stopped boxes are free. Stopping snapshots the filesystem and pauses billing until you resume.
Size changes the rate. A small box (2 vCPUs, 4 GB) consumes machine time at 0.5x, so the same balance lasts twice as long; a large box (8 vCPUs, 16 GB) consumes it at 2x. See Machine Capabilities.

Type	CPU / memory	Machine time	Effective cost
`small`	2 vCPUs, 4 GB	0.5 seconds per second	$0.018/h, ~$13/month running 24/7
`default`	4 vCPUs, 8 GB	1 second per second	$0.036/h, ~$26/month running 24/7
`large`	8 vCPUs, 16 GB	2 seconds per second	$0.072/h, ~$52/month running 24/7

Your balance is a single pool of machine time; the type only changes how fast it drains. box limits reports remaining compute in hours and remaining credits in dollars; box limits --json keeps the canonical second counts plus creditBalanceHours and packBalanceDollars.

Included with every box

A dedicated IPv4 address
Snapshots (the latest snapshot per box is kept, up to your box type’s data size: 12 GB on small, 50 GB on default, 70 GB on large)
Egress, up to 2 TB per box per month
Desktop streaming and hosted HTTPS ports

Plans

Every plan converts its price into machine time at the same rate, and sets your concurrency and start limits:

Plan	Included time	Concurrent boxes	Starts / min	Starts / hour	Starts / day
$20/mo	2,000,000 s (~555 h)	100	10	50	150
$100/mo	10,000,000 s (~2,777 h)	250	28	140	420
$500/mo	50,000,000 s (~13,888 h)	1000	55	275	825
$2000/mo	200,000,000 s (~55,555 h)	1500	70	350	1050

The per-hour rate is five times the per-minute burst, and the per-day rate is three times the hourly. These limits scale with your plan and rise as we add capacity; committed accounts can have them lifted further. Upgrade any time from Dashboard > Billing. Need more than the largest plan? Contact us, higher limits are agreed case by case.

On the free trial

Every plan starts with a free 7-day trial. Until your first payment lands, an account runs under its own limits rather than the plan’s:

Limit	On trial
Concurrent boxes	2
Machine starts	5 / min, 25 / hour, 75 / day
Machine time, in total	25 hours
Auto-stop	required, 2 hours maximum
Machine size	`small` and `default`; `large` is not available

Two of these change how boxes behave rather than how many you get. --no-auto-stop and any --ttl above two hours are refused with trial_auto_stop_required, and a resumed trial box gets a fresh window capped the same way, so nothing you start on the trial can run unattended overnight. --type large is refused with trial_machine_class_not_allowed. Adding a payment method lifts all five at once.

Machine starts

Creating a box, forking one and resuming a stopped one each count as one machine start, so a platform that stops boxes aggressively spends the same budget as one that creates them. Each plan sets three start limits that scale together: the per-minute burst rate listed above, five times that per hour, and three times the hourly rate per day. Size the per-minute rate for your spikiest moment, the hourly ceiling for your busiest hour, and the daily ceiling for your total traffic. GET /limits (and box limits --json) reports starts.minute|hour|day with limit, used and remaining for the rolling windows. Past any of them the API answers 429 with rate_limited, names which window you hit, and includes the same starts remaining counts. These limits scale with your plan and rise as we add capacity, and committed accounts can have them lifted further, so contact us if you need more.

Plan time vs credit packs

Your two pools work differently, and the difference only shows up at renewal:

Plan time is granted fresh at the start of every billing month and expires at the end of it. Whatever you did not spend is not carried forward and is not converted into credits.
Credit packs ($20 buys 2,000,000 seconds) never expire and carry over month to month.

Plan time is always spent first. Credits are only drawn once a month’s plan time is exhausted, and once drawn they are gone for good. The next renewal restores your plan time but never refills your credits. So a $20/month subscriber who also bought one $20 pack, and used 2.5M seconds in a month, ends that month having spent all 2M seconds of plan time plus 500,000 seconds of credit. They start the next month with 2M fresh plan seconds and 1.5M credit seconds remaining. Check your balance any time:

box limits
box limits --json

curl -sS "$BOX_API_BASE/limits" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $BOX_API_KEY"

const limits = await box.limits();
console.log(limits.canStart, limits.starts?.day?.remaining, limits.creditBalanceHours, limits.packBalanceDollars);

limits = box.limits()
day = getattr(limits.starts, "day", None)
print(limits.can_start, getattr(day, "remaining", None), limits.credit_balance_hours, limits.pack_balance_dollars)

See Get Box limits for every field.

Teams

A team has one shared balance and one plan, and any member can run boxes against it. Which balance a box draws from is decided when the box is created and travels with it from then on. The team is a wallet, not a shared workspace: boxes, snapshots, and environments stay with their creator.

How limits apply on a team

The start-rate and concurrency numbers on the plan are one shared pool for the whole organization, not a private allowance per member. A 5-seat team on the $20 plan has the $20 ceilings × 5: 500 concurrent boxes, 50 starts/min, 250/hour, 750/day. Those counters key on the team’s wallet. If one member burns the hourly start budget, every other member’s box new / fork / resume billed to that team is refused until the window rolls. A member’s personal boxes use that member’s own personal limits and do not count against the team pool. Those shared ceilings only stay seat-scaled while the team’s Stripe subscription is active. If the plan is canceled, leftover credit packs can still run boxes, but concurrency and start rate drop to a single seat. On top of the shared pool, the owner can cap an individual member (see Per-member caps). Pick the scope once and it sticks for every later box new:

box org                     # the wallet in effect right now
box org list                # organizations you belong to
box org switch acme         # bill new boxes (and limits) to acme
box org switch personal     # back to your own account
box --org acme new          # bill one create to acme without switching

box team switch still exists as a create-only sticky scope; box org switch is the wallet that also scopes box limits. box team switch personal and box org switch personal both return you to your own account. Override one box with box new --team <TEAM_ID>, box new --personal, or box --org personal new. The dashboard org selector bills the selected team the same way: create sends org in the body (and X-Box-Org). GET /limits accepts ?teamId=, ?org=, or X-Box-Org for the team’s remaining starts and balance.

	CLI	API	SDKs	Dashboard
See your teams	`box org list`	not available	not available	Team
Choose the billing scope	`box org switch` / `--org`	`?org=` / `X-Box-Org` (wallet only)	not available	sidebar org selector
Bill one box to a team	`box new --team` or `box --org acme new`	`POST /boxes` with `org` or `teamId`	not available	Boxes with the org selected
Create / transfer / delete org	`box org create` / `transfer` / `delete`	team routes	not available	Team
Invite and remove members	not available	not available	not available	Team
Per-member usage and caps	not available	not available	not available	Team

Invites, member-role changes, and per-member caps stay in the dashboard. Listing, snapshots, and environments stay creator-private even when a request carries an org scope. Per-box API keys cannot carry an org scope (403 scoped_api_key_forbidden).

Per-member caps

One shared balance means one member can spend it all. The owner can set two caps per member on the Team tab, both unlimited by default:

Cap	Limits
Usage cap	That member’s team-billed machine time per billing window
Concurrent boxes	How many team-billed boxes that member can run at once

Both apply only to team-billed boxes. A member’s personal boxes are never counted or touched, so a cap of zero means “no spending on this team”, not “no boxes at all”. Past a usage cap, box new, box fork and box resume on the team scope answer 402 with team_member_cap_reached. Past a concurrent-box cap they answer 429 with member_limit_reached. The member’s team boxes are snapshotted and archived within about a minute. There is no grace period, because a cap is policy rather than a failed payment — and nothing is lost or owed. Raising the cap, or the billing window renewing, makes those boxes resumable again.

Running out

When your balance reaches zero you get a 24 hour grace period, whether or not auto-pay is on. Your boxes keep running and you are alerted by email, so you can top up before anything stops. If the window passes without payment, running boxes are stopped with a snapshot. Nothing is lost; resume them after topping up. To never hit that stop, enable auto-pay in the billing dashboard. It charges your saved card in small automatic increments when you run out, drawing from any prepaid balance on your account first. If a monthly renewal payment fails while you still have credits, your boxes stay up until the credits run out. Because boxes keep running through the grace period, you can end up using a little more machine time than you had. creditBalanceSeconds stops at zero and reads 0 while that is outstanding; the shortfall is carried and settled on your next payment, so the seconds you consumed are the seconds you pay for.

​Included with every box

​Plans

​On the free trial

​Machine starts

​Plan time vs credit packs

​Teams

​How limits apply on a team

​Per-member caps

​Running out

​Related

Included with every box

Plans

On the free trial

Machine starts

Plan time vs credit packs

Teams

How limits apply on a team

Per-member caps

Running out

Related