Plan tiers

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

Resource quotas for Akua-managed machines are enforced when a machine record is created. Launch-concurrency limits apply to both Akua-managed and BYOM machines. 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. The Free “Machines” row isn’t a renewable slot like the other rows in this table. It reflects the account’s one-time managed-VM trial: one free Akua-managed machine, ever, across every workspace and organization. Deleting the trial machine, whether by TTL expiry or manually, releases the slot but doesn’t grant a new trial — the account needs BYOM or a Pro subscription to run another Akua-managed machine. Pro’s “3” and BYOM’s “Unlimited” stay ordinary renewable resource quotas: they apply for as long as the subscription or cloud credential is active, independent of whether the account already used its free trial. See the one-time managed-VM trial.

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Machine TTL

Seven days is the trial machine’s own lifetime, not a recurring reset: once that machine is gone, the account’s one-time trial stays consumed whether the machine expired, was deleted manually, or its workspace/organization was deleted and recreated.

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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 resource quota enforcement. Launch-concurrency and rate limits still apply:

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

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

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