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 the balance in default-equivalent seconds.

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	Machine starts per minute
$20/mo	2,000,000 s (~555 h)	100	10
$100/mo	10,000,000 s (~2,777 h)	200	20
$500/mo	50,000,000 s (~13,888 h)	800	35
$2000/mo	200,000,000 s (~55,555 h)	1200	60

Upgrade any time from Dashboard > Billing. Need more than the largest plan? Contact us, higher limits are agreed case by case. Every plan starts with a free 7-day trial. Trial accounts are limited to 4 concurrent boxes, 5 starts per minute, 20 box creations per day, and 25 hours of machine time in total until the first payment.

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. The per-minute rate above is a burst allowance. On top of it, every account sits under two platform ceilings that no plan lifts:

Ceiling	Limit
Starts per hour	600
Starts per day	1,500

The two are not proportional on purpose: you can burst 600 starts inside one hour, and spend 1,500 across the whole day, so about two and a half peak hours’ worth. Size the per-minute rate for your spikiest moment, the hourly ceiling for your busiest hour, and the daily ceiling for your total traffic. Past a start limit the API answers 429 with start_limit_reached. If your workload needs more, contact us.

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

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

const limits = await box.limits();
console.log(limits.canStart, limits.creditBalanceSeconds);

limits = box.limits()
print(limits.can_start, limits.credit_balance_seconds)

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. Pick the scope once and it sticks for every later box new:

box team                    # the scope in effect right now
box team list               # teams you belong to
box team switch acme        # bill new boxes to acme's shared balance
box team switch personal    # back to your own account

Override it for one box with box new --team <TEAM_ID>, or box new --personal to bill yourself while a team scope is active.

	CLI	API	SDKs	Dashboard
See your teams	`box team list`	not available	not available	Team
Choose the billing scope	`box team switch`	not available	not available	Team
Bill one box to a team	`box new --team`	not available	not available	not available
Invite and remove members	not available	not available	not available	Team
Per-member usage	not available	not available	not available	Team

Teams are not in the public API yet, so there is no SDK method and no way to create a team-billed box from a service. Creating the team, managing membership and reading per-member usage all happen in the dashboard; the CLI only chooses which balance you spend.

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

​Machine starts

​Plan time vs credit packs

​Teams

​Running out

​Related

Included with every box

Plans

Machine starts

Plan time vs credit packs

Teams

Running out

Related