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Your effective tier is resolved from this workspace's subscription and your account's highest workspace tier, then governs three compute policies — quotas, instance types, and machine TTL — while a BYOM cloud key bypasses every gate.
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.

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Tier resolution

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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.

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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.

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What each tier controls

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Instance type filtering

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

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Quota enforcement

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

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Machine TTL

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Auto-scaling behavior

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When tiers change

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.